Last week, Donald Trump unaccountably blamed DEI for the catastrophic plane crash in Washington, D.C. — a claim that was “baseless” and “without evidence,” as noted a very reasonable 1 million times by the media. Nonetheless, the usual disinformation merchants took up Trump’s smear, yipping with joy when it came out that the pilot of the Black Hawk helicopter was a woman. (Imagine, dying in the line of duty — and for just 70% of what her male counterparts were being paid!)

The family bravely refused to release her name, knowing that trolls were ready to pounce with questions about her “competence.” But then they relented over the weekend, and we found out that the pilot was Capt. Rebecca Lobach — who, by the way, was in the top 20% of Army ROTC cadets in the ENTIRE country! The Daily Beast reported that her Army career was “brilliant,” as did a friend in ROTC training with her at college. Sabrina Bell (another friend) said Lobach was “meticulous in everything she did.”

Enough said! That obviously should have ended the matter. But Trump’s relentless attacks on DEI come right on the heels of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stating, during his nomination hearings, that the military routinely lowers standards for women. With these aspersions on DEI running rampant, a strong response is needed.

Instead of suppressing inquiries into Capt. Lobach’s abilities, her family should demand an immediate and detailed investigation into her service record, her test scores and specifically, her performance on the night of Jan. 29. I’m sure we will find out that, far from getting a pass, she had to be better than her male colleagues just to reach the same point.

As MSNBC’s Joy Reid pointed out in 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s elevation to the Supreme Court provided “a great lesson for the way that black women have to over, over, OVER perform, just to get to where people who are far less intelligent … get for free.”

White guys, Reid noted, like Sens. Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham — and any white men involved in the D.C. crash, I might add — are given a free ride because “their dad … or their grandparents had their name on the building.” (Boy, if I had a nickel for every white guy I know who’s had a building named after his grandfather!) By contrast, women — especially black women! — "had to work their way [up].“

Investigators should bear in mind that Capt. Lobach was surely a victim of "mansplaining.” But as the helicopter pilot, she was in charge. (Fortunately, she was a certified sexual harassment/assault response and prevention victim advocate and would know how to handle any mansplaining.)

After all, this isn’t the first time women in the military have been falsely accused of being unqualified just because of their gender. Kara Hultgreen was one of the first two female pilots qualified to fly the $38 million F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. In October 1994, her jet suffered a crash, which, tragically, she did not survive.

Soon, so-called “whistleblowers” were faxing media organizations nasty innuendo about Hultgreen’s abilities, charging that she was unfit to fly the Tomcat, but had been promoted to fill apocryphal gender “quotas.”

Navy experts immediately defended Hultgreen from these false accusations. Her training commander, Capt. Tom Sobieck, reminded The New York Times, “We have one standard, and everyone has to meet that.”

In short order, the Navy put an end to the nonsense by releasing the result of an internal investigation: Hultgreen’s plane had crashed because of mechanical failure, not pilot error. Rear Adm. Jay B. Yakeley went on the record to confirm that the Navy had concluded that the cause was engine failure. Vice Adm. Robert Spane said: “This was a gender-neutral accident.”

On ABC’s “World News Tonight,” anchor Peter Jennings could finally announce that Hultgreen was “blameless,” labeling her critics “vicious.” “Nightline” reported that she had been “vindicated” and “cleared of blame.” A Times editorial on the Navy’s exoneration of Hultgreen suggested that her anonymous critics might want to be “gender neutral” themselves when “the next servicewoman dies in the line of duty.”

I expect much the same will happen after a thorough investigation of Capt. Lobach’s handling of the Black Hawk.

CORRECTION: Five months after Hultgreen’s crash, an anonymous informant sent the real report to the Navy Times, which posted it on the internet. It turned out the accident was entirely Hultgreen’s fault. The Navy investigation found that she overshot the approach, and in trying to correct, stalled out the left engine, then became confused and lost awareness of flight indicators, didn’t inform her back-seat partner of the problem, and failed to eject in time.

Admittedly, that was a setback. But consider that it took five months for the truth to emerge — and, five months from now, Trump will probably already have been impeached again. He needs to be humiliated PRONTO. DEI hangs in the balance.

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