USA Today’s Report on Trump Blaming DEI for Air Crash Exposes Ugly Truth About SPLC

If the legacy media wanted to prove that the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion is a smokescreen for the Left’s woke priorities, it couldn’t do much better than USA Today’s response to President Donald Trump’s statement about Wednesday night’s horrific aircraft collision over Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Trump blamed DEI for the crash, suggesting that misplaced priorities in the previous administration had contributed to an environment where officials cut corners on safety in order to achieve left-wing goals.

USA Today reported that “civil rights leaders” slammed Trump for the remarks, but the paper led its coverage with one of the least credible organizations in America today.

“Blaming a tragic air crash on what makes our country great, which is our diversity, equity and inclusion, it’s offensive, and it’s wrong, especially because we know these values make our nation stronger,’’ Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told USA Today.

USA Today featured her quote in the second paragraph of its story, as Exhibit A of the backlash.

That was a mistake of epic proportions.

What Did Trump Say?

Trump offered condolences Thursday to the families of 67 people killed in the collision of an Army helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet on Wednesday. He also pointed to DEI programs in federal agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, as part of the problem possibly contributing to the crash.

Trump noted that he increased the standards for FAA officials during his first administration, but the Biden administration lowered them. He blamed then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for pushing DEI over high standards.

“The FAA’s diversity push includes a focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities,” he said.

One reporter asked him why he thought DEI might be responsible for the crash, and he replied, “Because I have common sense.”

Trump lamented that DEI gets in the way of hiring staff for competence—their basic ability to do the important jobs in front of them.

Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center is the last organization that should lecture Trump about the virtues of diversity and inclusion.

As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC smears mainstream conservative and Christian organizations by placing them on a “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. A former employee described that as a “highly profitable scam” to scare donors into ponying up cash.

A terrorist used the “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit for a 2012 mass shooting that was thwarted by a security guard, and the SPLC currently faces a defamation lawsuit for branding a conservative nonprofit an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

The SPLC should have lost all credibility on the Left. It fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019. After that scandal, the staff unionized. Amid layoffs last year that included many union members, disgruntled staff accused the SPLC of union-busting.

Yet the Left still favors the SPLC.

My second book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” exposes how far-left activist groups—including the SPLC—infiltrated and advised the Biden administration. While conservatives often mock the SPLC as an irrelevant joke, the Left frequently uses it as a tool to silence its enemies, and the Biden administration reportedly solicited advice from the SPLC on how to combat “domestic terrorism.”

Diversity and Inclusion

While the SPLC touts the virtues of “diversity,” it actively seeks to quash diversity of opinion by demonizing those who dissent from its leftist agenda. It brands conservatives who want to enforce immigration law “anti-immigrant hate groups.” It brands advocates for religious freedom “anti-LGBTQ hate groups.” It brands parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty as “anti-government extremists.”

The SPLC doesn’t even stand for diversity within the LGBT movement. The center smeared Gays Against Groomers, a group of LGBT people who oppose transgender lessons in school, as an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” because the SPLC disagrees with its goals.

As for “inclusion,” it’s hard to find an organization that represents exclusion as well as the SPLC. Not only does it brand people who dissent from its agenda “haters,” suggesting they’re a threat on par with the Klan, but it also urges Big Tech, charitable donation platforms, and government to deplatform, debank, and otherwise “cancel” them.

The SPLC has launched and advised efforts to keep donors from giving to conservative causes. One of its key targets is the donor-advised fund—a kind of charitable savings account by which a financial institution operates a fund on behalf of donors and directs their dollars to causes the donors support.

The SPLC partnered with another group in the “Woketopus,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to publish a report called “Hate-Free Philanthropy,” which urges donor-advised funds to blacklist conservatives and Christians.

The SPLC also released a report on “extremist finance” that pressured donor-advised funds operated by major banks to blacklist “hate groups.”

In 2019, the Amalgamated Foundation, a project of the SEIU-owned Amalgamated Bank, launched the “Hate Is Not Charitable” campaign, urging donor-advised funds to blacklist groups the SPLC brands “hate groups.” The Service Employees International Union and Amalgamated Bank also bankroll the leftist groups that influenced Biden policy.

What Does All This Mean?

USA Today’s Deborah Barfield Barry quoted other activists in the article, but kept returning to the SPLC’s Huang. The reporter did not add any background about the SPLC’s scandals or its track record of quashing intellectual diversity and championing exclusion.

When Huang said that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is the secret to “what makes our country great,” she didn’t mean intellectual diversity. She meant the woke worldview based on critical race theory—the idea that American society is systemically racist and needs to promote racial minorities rather than apply the law in a colorblind fashion.

DEI may present itself as noble, but like the SPLC, it’s an attempt to stifle dissent and force radical change. DEI involves promoting people based on certain characteristics, rather than based on merit, and as such, it hinders important institutions like the FAA from hiring and promoting the most competent people for the job.

By giving voice to a morally bankrupt organization that uses DEI as a cudgel against its opponents, USA Today unwittingly helped reveal that Trump’s criticism of DEI is accurate, and that DEI is itself a smokescreen to pursue the woke agenda.

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