Tucker Carlson Seemingly Suggests People Of Color And Women Won’t Be Competent Enough To Become Pilots After United Airlines Announces Diversity Initiative; Says Initiative Will ‘Get People Killed’

Tucker Carlson claims United Airlines’ diversity initiative will eventually kill people.

The Fox News host, 51, says people will die if United Airlines moves forward with its new diversity initiative that was announced on Tuesday. United is the only airline with its own flight school, United Aviate Academy, which just announced it will be training 5,000 new pilots by 2030. As a part of a new initiative, United is pushing for at least half of the pilots to be women and people of color. 

This triggered Carlson, who on Wednesday’s segment “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” said, “Safety is no longer that airline’s top concern—identity politics is.” Carlson seemingly alluded to the idea that people of color and women won’t be as qualified as other people.

“The way people look is totally irrelevant. How they perform is all you should care about. Once you forget that, airplanes tend to crash…Hiring on the basis of irrelevant criteria will, over time, get people killed, and it will,” he said. “We have to fight for the colorblind meritocracy for real. I mean, our lives depend on meritocracy.” Carlson went on to call United’s initiative “a combination of a hyper-aggressive corporate HR department and a left-wing political action committee… big on moral pronouncements and mandatory social engineering.”

Carlson’s indirect racism isn’t getting to United CEO Scott Kirby. Kirby chatted with CBS and explained that it’s important to provide people of color an opportunity to be trained and become a pilot. He noted that only 7 percent of the airline’s pilots are female and only 13 percent of its pilots aren’t white. 

On Twitter, United released a statement saying, “All the highly qualified candidates we accept into the academy, regardless of race or sex, will have met or exceeded the standards we set for admittance.” Carlson called the company’s stamens a lie. 

“We know they’re lying and you know it too,” he said, “because in the airline business there is only one standard that matters, and it is not race, and it’s not gender. It’s competence.”