“Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

While this quotation is often attributed to Mark Twain, he himself attributed it to British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Whatever the case, this line comes to mind today, in light of an Axios op-ed denouncing President Trump’s claim that DEI might have played a part in the horrific crash a couple days ago at Reagan Internation Airport.

At initial glance, I thought that Trump’s assertions were perhaps premature, and while we don’t have all the facts, a strong case can be made that DEI likely played a pivotal role in the crash.

Axios unwittingly exposes the DEI fallacy when it writes:

The big picture: Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and IPUMS show air traffic controllers and airfield operations specialists are predominately male and white.

By the numbers: 78% are men, while 22% are women, per data from the U.S. Census Bureau and IPUMS.

• 71% identify as non-Hispanic white.
• The data includes air traffic controllers and airfield operations specialists working in air transportation or services incidental to transportation.

And, the fallacy – “Trump implicitly equated racial, gender and other forms of diversity with a lower-quality federal workforce.”

No, that is not what Trump did. Trump stated that DEI “hiring practices” created a situation where less qualified applicants were being recruited based on race, gender and other forms of diversity, and white, male candidates were being overlooked, for the sole purpose of creating a more equitable workforce. This equitable hiring practice directly led to a drop in qualified applicants to this extremely important, and meritocratic vocation.

It is estimated that there is a 3,000-person shortage in air traffic controllers. Further, it is being reported that due to staffing shortages (not the race or gender of the persons working), one air traffic controller was fulfilling the job normally assigned to two persons at Reagan International.

Axios’ bad logic continues here:

Trump signed a memo Thursday alleging that Biden's administration "egregiously rejected merit-based hiring, requiring all agencies to implement dangerous 'diversity equity and inclusion' tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with 'severe intellectual' disabilities in the FAA," according to a person familiar with the matter.

Which brings us to the second fallacy -- The American Association of People with Disabilities said on X that FAA employees with disabilities did not cause the crash.

Again, the president did not state or assert that the cause of the crash was due to a disabled person. The president, rightly, is stating that the FAA should not set as a criterion for employment that one must either be a person of color, a woman (whatever that is), and/or someone with “severe intellectual” disabilities.

Of course, eliminating this last criterion would almost certainly disqualify radical leftists and Axios contributors from the applicant pool.

Image: Axios