Programming note: Join me tonight for the latest episode of our brand new Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, a piece of speculative fiction from 1907 on the world of the early twenty-first century.
~So we shall modify our increasingly boorish and obnoxious "As I said twenty years ago..." feature and change it to "As I said ten years ago..." - before "woke" was a concept, or even a word. Me in 2015:
My problem with all this is that, increasingly, key levers of society are being ceded to the irredeemably stupid and mendacious, who seem to be the only ones capable of navigating the rocks and rapids of political correctness. One has the uneasy feeling that similar scenarios are playing out every day around the western world. How long before the planes start dropping out of the sky?
We now have an answer to that question. What happened at the principal airport of the national capital was an accident that, as the new president put it in his initial reaction, should not have happened. He's entirely correct on that. A commuter jet and an army helicopter colliding above the airport is a disaster from the last century, rendered all but obsolete by the technological advances of the new millennium.
But, as we learned, not quite obsolete. There is still a critical human element - and the control tower at Reagan National is not altogether reassuring on that front:
"Staffing at the air traffic control tower at Ronald Reagan National Airport was "not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic...The controller who was handling helicopters...was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways" pic.twitter.com/Tts8z09G4Y
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) January 30, 2025
There are usually two controllers from 10am to 9.30pm. So the Trump-Musk-Duffy massive layoffs have kicked in? Er, no. On Wednesday, shortly before the crash, the "supervisor" "allowed one air traffic controller to leave work early". As Lloyd Bridges would say, looks like I picked the wrong week for my gender-affirming surgery.
Boy, the families of those poor Russian and American skaters will have a helluva lawsuit.
Or maybe not - I know something about judges and juries in that neck of the woods.
But at the very least, from the emerging facts, this seems to be an example of another familiar reprise at this website: Nothing works anymore. I must have flown into and out of that bloody awful airport a thousand times over the years, and it never occurred to me that, when you land in the imperial metropolis of the global hyperpower, there's twenty-seven FAA diversity-outreach officers but one air-traffic guy.
The President has now expanded his critique - to the fury of the media:
Trump sparks outcry with implication that DEI policies are at fault in D.C. midair collision
The BBC's man in Washington professes to be baffled by the presidential logic:
Trump said the hiring guidance for the FAA's diversity and inclusion programme included preference for those with disabilities involving "hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism".
An archived version of a website for the FAA's diversity and inclusion hiring programme that appears to have been taken down in December included a similar list. The agency was seeking people with "targeted disabilities" that the federal government was prioritising for recruitment at the time.
But it's unclear how that drive to make recruitment more diverse may have impacted the ranks of air traffic controllers, who President Trump said needed to all be "naturally talented geniuses". The FAA has more than 35,000 employees, only a fraction of which perform that role.
So the Beeb is answering the planes-dropping-from-the-sky point I made in 2015: Yeah, sure, we're hiring people on the basis of complete paralysis and severe intellectual disability but relax, our workforce is 35,000 strong and the teensy-weensy "fraction" who do anything that really matters will somehow remain an exception to that. As the residents of Pacific Palisades have just learned, if you want water in your fire hydrants, hiring lesbians to run the department isn't necessarily the best way to go.
Not quite a decade ago but close (2018), I was guest-hosting for Tucker and introduced a pre-taped segment he'd done on what I called "one of the more absurd manifestations of the diversity über alles cult - the Obama Administration's decision with respect to air traffic control to prioritize those who check approved identity-group boxes over those who know something about, er, air traffic". Here's the first of those Tucker reports:
Not so long ago, we used to know a thing or two about functioning societies: ailing dictators, going back to Stalin, find it hard to get treatment from competent doctors because their medical systems prioritise regime loyalty. And here we are in 2025, having adopted for almost every industry a modish variant of the Stalin model. Sample headline from the last half-decade:
Two years in, Biden has prioritized nominating women of color as judges
Likewise, he prioritised hiring a non-binary kleptomaniac as his Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Nuclear Energy, and an unconvincing tranny as his Public Health admiral. But, hey, to return to that BBC wallah's assurance, the tiny "fraction" of personnel you actually need to keep you alive in planes and hospitals will somehow now and forever be immune from that trend. Third World strongmen flying in to Swiss clinics aren't that deluded.
Courtesy of Ann Coulter, here's a New York Times story from a year ago:
One air traffic controller went into work drunk this summer and joked about "making big money buzzed." Another routinely smoked marijuana during breaks.
Me again from yonks back:
For years as monsters marched through the campuses, and indeed America itself degenerated into one giant college campus, the complaceniks assured us that, oh, yeah, well, the Gender Studies departments are pretty bad, oh, and the English department, and classics, and music ...but STEM is holding firm and that's what counts, so relax, chill, because places like MIT will remain globally dominant 'centers of excellence'.
I think not. It's hard to retain centers of excellence in a desert of self-moronization.
That decade-old crack arose in the context of a CNN segment, where the analysts pondered the presence of an Isis flag at the Pride parade. In fact, the "Isis flag" was a celebratory banner showing various dildos and "butt plugs". The inability to distinguish between "Allahu Akbar" and a butt plug explains a lot about where we are.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.