If the Modern Republicans and Conservative Movement Want People to Stop Calling Them Racists, Maybe They Should Stop Acting Like Racists

What happened with the Titan submersible was a tragedy. I don’t care if the people were rich or poor as others seem to. The fact is that five people died what were very possibly horrific deaths. What I’ve seen from many people over the last few days hasn’t put people from any side of the social and political spectrum in good light. People have been almost giddy to joke about five people dying because they were rich. A number of people, mainly on the right but some on the far left, have twisted news reports about the Navy detecting the sound of a possible implosion to turn that into conspiracies to fit their political narratives. One largely failed conservative-leaning actor even figured out a way to make a bad joke about their death in order to let everyone know for the millionth time that he really hates the Clintons.

But the response that has surprised me the most, even though it shouldn’t, is the fairly unified message from the conservative media, the conservative punditry, and the conservative social media influencers that the real lesson here is the dangers of “woke” and of hiring black people.

The narrative being pushed involves selectively editing or selectively reporting on an older interview with Stockton Rush where he commented on not wanting to have “50-year-old white guys” piloting his vessels. The line is being misrepresented to imply that his goal was to hire people of color over qualified white pilots and thus this was diversity hiring run amock and wokeness gone mad.

The problem is, he not only didn’t say that but he also didn’t imply it. He never mentions race in his interview. He talked about how, when he started the business, he saw a lot of companies that hired older guys who were retired military or some such and all you saw was 50-year-old white guys. He wanted younger people- citing the age of 25 -who he could both inspire and train well and who he thought would then inspire other younger individuals to enter into the field. Age was really the only thing he referenced.

But, of course, conservative after conservative after conservative has taken this and run with it to specifically cite the “woke” and “diversity hiring” dangers of hiring black pilots over qualified white pilots.

And this is not just a handful of them. I’m including just a few screencaps, but you could spend an entire day going through the articles, posts, and tweets taking his comments and linking them to “woke” and “diversity” and find quite a few where the “black pilot” is explicitly referenced. A few also work in jabs at hiring *gasp* female pilots. And, of course, their readers/followers have picked this up and run with it, regurgitating “woke” and “diversity hiring” all across the internet and talking about how they don’t want “black pilots” as much as they want competent, experienced, and safe pilots.

It’s quite the sight to see. It’s also amazingly racist. How? In case you didn’t know, these are the people who died on that sub.

You may notice a very distinct absence of black people in this photo. Yet, somehow, all across conservative social media, they’re finding a way to blame the hiring of black people, other minorities, or women for this tragedy. It is the fault, in their world, of black pilots and the wokeness that gets them hired that brought this tragedy about.

You might also note that this lineup doesn’t exactly scream “youth culture” here. The youngest person on the sub was Suleman Dawood. He was there because of his father, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, who was also on board. One of the men- note also the absence of women for the few who are highlighting that in their cries of “wokeness” being behind this tragedy -was also the French dive expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet. You can see who they all were here.

Yet, somehow, despite what we can see here, according to many in the modern conservative movement, this should be a warning to all about hiring black people, other minorities, and women over white guys.

What’s laughable in this is the sub was, in fact, being piloted by an old white guy.

But, do you want to know why it’s beyond laughable that stating that hiring minorities and women to be pilots is deadly and what killed these people is the narrative they want to run with here? Do you want to know what makes this repugnant embrace of their racist natures all the more insane?

This is an insane moment to go open, full racist on because the race, the gender, or, for that matter, the age of a pilot has absolutely nothing at all to do with what happened here.

The Titan suffered structural failure and imploded.

This wasn’t pilot error, this was a structural failure.

And the story behind that structural failure is likely why so many of these people are rushing to their cameras, their microphones, and their keyboards to blame wokeness, diversity, and black people. Because the story behind that failure they want to distract from by playing up the dog whistle they know their base will happily embrace is very much rooted in a desired Republican goal for all of America.

Stockton Rush was a donor to and supporter of Republicans. One of the beliefs he seemed to share with many of the Tea Party Republicans, the Trump/MAGA Republicans, and far too many of the Republicans from prior to those eras was a belief that safety regulations and requirements were just pesky impediments to cutting costs and maintaining profits.

You can see the full article this came from here.

Stockton Rush did everything he could to ignore safety and cut costs. He ignored warnings and refused to put his design through the proper testing. Will Kohnen, the chair of the Marine Technology Society’s Submarine Committee, formally addressed the issues around his project to Stockton some years ago. David Lochridge, who was the Director of Marine Operations for the Titan project, was fired in 2018 after insisting on more rigorous safety checks on the submersible. The most recent reports at the time of this writing indicate Rush refused to allow any outside agency to do safety checks or evaluations of the vessel. It’s also being reported now that the sub wasn’t even certified at all for the dives it was taking.

It wasn’t “wokeness” that helped to lead to this tragedy, and it certainly wasn’t hiring black people. But the modern American conservative movement is happily going stupid and racist here for definitely one and likely two reasons.

First, they know it will resonate with their viewers, listeners, and readers.

The likely second, they want their viewers, listeners, and readers to go to their popular scapegoats- minorities and women -even though it’s laughably irrelevant here because they don’t want their viewers, listeners, and readers to think about how this is what Republicans want to do to everything.

Stockton Rush did with his company and this sub what Republicans dream of being able to do to many other businesses. He did away with safety regulations and safety testing.

Republicans have, for years now, fought to get safety regulations, testing, and enforcement stripped out of the food industry, workplaces, the manufacturing of products that go into our homes, and where the environment is concerned in the name of capitalism and corporate profits. Republicans literally fawned over Trump declaring that any safety regulation created by the government would require the instant removal of two others.

The one longtime argument they’ve presented is that no one is going to make bad products they have to use or pollute the town their employees live in. The argument to that was usually that the owner of the company didn’t live in that town and they would buy better made things than the things they were selling to the general public.

And, where food was the issue, we were told that they obviously worry about the food they put into their mouths just like everyone else.

Well, here we have a Republican supporter and donor who lived the Republican dream of cutting costs and improving potential profit by cutting every corner and gutting every safety protocol. He didn’t seem to care that it was his life he was risking as well as other people’s lives. He even made it clear that, as the Republicans play it up, he was innovating and leading the way by ignoring even the most common sense safety measures and the actual experts in that field.

They definitely don’t want their viewers, listeners, and readers thinking about that.

But there’s also another thing that helped to bring about this tragedy. James Cameron touches on it in the video above. History repeats itself when we ignore it.

Rush was buying his own bs for far too long now. This sub was a poorly constructed deathtrap. Almost everyone else with the knowledge to be able to judge such things could see it and they warned Rush. But, in his mind, as he stated himself, his sub was indestructible. It turned out to be indestructible in the same way the Titanic was unsinkable. Like with the Titanic, many warnings were ignored by the captain of the vessel, and safety measures were cut for profits or simply ignored. Both resulted in tragedy, one far greater than the other.

We’ve been talking about the Titanic for over a century. We’ve romanticized the story in countless retellings of it and lost sight of many of the things that contributed to the tragedy of the Titanic. Almost the only one everyone seems to know is that they didn’t have enough lifeboats.

Many people are already talking about wanting to stop talking about the Titan and the people who died on it. It was just rich people dying. Let the story die and move on to whatever new distraction the media throws at us next. But we shouldn’t let that happen. We should still be talking about this in a century, but talking about it in the ways we should have been talking about the Titanic.

Every step leading to this tragedy should be gone over, discussed, remembered, and treated like the warning it should be to everyone else. Titan should be a lesson for a long time to come, not a forgotten tragedy.

And the modern American conservative movement and Republicans really need to stop being this stupidly racist.