“My first wife was ’tarded,” said the low-IQ “Doctor Lexus” while reassuring his patient in the 2006 film Idiocracy. “She’s a pilot now.” A bit later in the movie, a plane is seen crashing in the distance while everyone goes about his business cavalierly, completely inured to such gross incompetence. Now, some may say it’s a bit frivolous opening an article on a serious topic with a popular-culture reference. It’s not, however, any more frivolous than a girl-power commercial produced by the airline involved in last Monday’s Toronto crash. What’s more, the commercial perhaps offers insight into why the mishap occurred. It’s also a commentary on our decaying meritocracy — and brings us closer to “idiocracy.”

To review, the accident involved Delta Flight 4819, operated by Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air. The CRJ900 twin-jet aircraft was landing at 2:15 p.m. ET at Toronto Pearson International Airport when it crashed. The issue, apparently, was pilot error. Reports hold that the plane was coming in too fast, hit the runway hard, sustained damage, and flipped over.

Fortunately, all 80 people aboard the aircraft survived, though there were 21 injuries, some relatively serious. But in the accident’s wake, allegations have arisen that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives were to blame. After all, Endeavor Air is devoted to DEI, boasting about hiring woman pilots and even touting “unmanned” (all-female) crews. Moreover, we’ve learned that a 26-year-old woman named Kendal Swanson was in the jet’s cockpit. And some sources claim she was at the controls when the plane crashed.

Additionally, this comes on the heels of the January 29 air disaster, which also involved a female pilot. In that incident, a military Black Hawk helicopter controlled by the young lady was flying too high and crashed into a passenger plane over Washington, D.C., killing all 67 people aboard the two aircraft.

In reality, we may never know the precise facts of the Toronto crash, especially given Canada’s woke political culture. Regardless, Endeavor’s behavior doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Just consider the aforementioned DEI promotional video (below) the airline created recently. It’s so juvenile that many may suppose it’s satire. But it’s apparently real — and really jaw-dropping.

In light of the Toronto crash, X respondents quite predictably had fun with the above — and made some good points. A sampling:

Not surprisingly, some controversy has raged among commenters about whether women are innately suited to being pilots. Yet a major point can be overlooked.

Not quite 10 percent of FAA-licensed pilots are female. Thus, prioritizing finding candidates from that group means drawing from a tiny talent pool, a very “shallow bench.” You simply will not find the best pilots, overall, with such limitations.

It’s much like prioritizing the finding of NBA players from our Asian-descent population (7.2 percent of the total). While some Asian-descent Americans surely are excellent basketball players, it’s not a recipe for finding the best. The NBA is approximately 75 percent black for a reason.

Yet another, quite interesting factor was elucidated by writer Russ Rodgers at American Free News Network on Saturday. Rodgers first mentions research showing that women are twice as likely as men to mishandle aircraft. But he next addresses the matter of men and women flying together as a team. (The case in both the D.C. and Toronto crashes.) He then writes, in “Recent Air Accidents… I Blame Feminism”:

Men and women behave differently around each other than when with the same sex, and it takes very strong character traits to overcome this. I have observed this phenomenon for decades, as a school teacher, an Army Noncommissioned Officer, and a professional political consultant and lobbyist.

… Men and women can become easily distracted with each other. For that matter, it is well researched that some of the principal places where affairs begin are in close-contact environments, such as the office, the gym, or even at church. In aviation, the cockpit is the office, while crewmembers also spend considerable amount of time around each other when not flying. When I was a young tank commander back in the mid-1980s, a group of us were asked our opinion about women integrated with men in combat units. In the comment section, I wrote that I was sure there were some women out there who could throw a 50-pound shell into the tank gun’s breach. But my main concern was struggling to keep the men and women focused on the mission and out of each other’s sleeping bags.

Yet physical intimacy isn’t necessary for opposite-sex pilot pairs to be problematic. Consider, for example, the January 29 Black Hawk tragedy. Rodgers says that he has no reason whatsoever to think the male and female pilots were intimate. Yet he does suspect something else:

Rather, somewhere along the way the two became unduly familiar to the point that their professionalism suffered, what in the military we call “losing one’s military bearing.” Indeed, there are a group of female pilots who recently did a radio show where they spoke of the commonality of this very problem, with men obviously distracted by the presence of a woman in the cockpit.

Rodgers also mentions another possibility. The male pilot, who was the instructor in the Black Hawk, might have been reluctant to point out the female’s deficiencies due to woke social pressure, which has become intense in the military. That she’d worked as a sexual assault response officer might have exacerbated this problem, too. Whatever the case, Rodgers sums up thus:

I will go where nobody wants to go…. Men and women should never … ever … be in the same operational environment when critical safety is involved.

Yet there’s something else to be pondered. Returning to my NBA analogy, let’s say someone did passionately insist on increasing the league’s Asian-descent representation. The first question should be: Why?

Is there any reason to think it will make the game better or more marketable? Merely wanting to make the change in deference to Equality Dogma is not a valid reason. It’s a hang-up.

But the hang-ups are everywhere. United Airlines resolved in 2021 that 50 percent of the 5,000 pilots it trained in the next decade should be women or “people of color.” (Heck, you can’t even see those people of no color.) But why? Actually, comedian Rob Schneider provided a reason in the following 45-second video.

Moving on, we also learned that the Obama administration had dumbed down the air-traffic-controller corps.

Why?

Obama also applied DEI to the Federal Aviation Administration. For a striking example, they emphasized hiring people with “targeted disabilities,” such as “severe intellectual disability” and “psychiatric disability” (seriously).

Why?

And, of course, they prioritize hiring female pilots.

Why?

Will it make air travel better?

Well, the social engineers do have their reasons — and they’re about as serious and sober as Endeavor’s girl-power commercial.