WATCH: Michael Knowles on DEI Infecting Airlines: ‘This Is Actual Suicide’

January 17th, 2024 2:57 PM

The Daily Wire host Michael Knowles laid out the stakes of pursuing diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) in the airline industry. As expected, they are very high. 

During the Jan. 16 edition of The Michael Knowles Show, Knowles made clear that embracing DEI always means sacrificing “candidate quality” and “merit” to other considerations, thus making it harder for employers, universities and other institutions to do quality work. “DEI in restaurants means that you value diversity more than your dinner. DEI in universities means that you value diversity more than your education. That’s not good, that’s a little scary. DEI in the cockpit means that you value diversity more than your life. And I do not,” Knowles warned. He further referred to DEI initiatives in the airline industry as “actual suicide.”

Knowles played some footage of United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby pledging his support for DEI to a passionately woke interviewer, before expressing his concern about DEI in the airline industry. “I don’t care what this man does to his C-suite. I don’t care if he fills it all with a bunch of lesbian, pigmy, Muslim Zoroastrians. I don’t care. The cockpit worries me,” Knowles explained.,  “DEI is necessarily opposed to quality, necessarily. Because what DEI says is, ‘We’re going to make you use diversity, equity and inclusion standards to deprioritize merit when you hire someone, or admit someone into your university, or bring someone into your club. We’re going to deprioritize merit because we’re boosting sex or race or sexual behaviors or whatever.’”

Knowles’ comments follow an airline disaster where a door fell off a Boeing jet mid-flight. Near-miss air collisions have risen 63% during the DEI-obsessed Biden administration’s time managing the Federal Aviation Administration. 

Knowles panned the “logically impossible” arguments that DEI “accentuates quality and merit.” He insisted that this was not possible because DEI initiatives specifically subordinate quality and merit to other factors. 

Instead, Knowles referred to diversity initiatives as “radical leftist politics” and “degrading to everyone.” Returning to the implementation of DEI initiatives in the airlines, Knowles cautioned “I certainly don’t like [diversity] more than I like my life. This is madness. This is actual suicide… I am certain that DEI policies will lower the candidate quality of the pilots and I don’t wanna on those planes.”

While Knowles said that he does not personally fly on United Airlines, he jokingly recommended that the rest of us commend ourselves to God. 

Conservatives are under attack! Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report on the dangers of leftist DEI ideology infecting corporate America