Not funny: United Airlines’ bizarre corporate wokeness could cost lives

Special to WorldTribune.com, January 16, 2024

Corporate WATCH

Commentary by Joe Schaeffer  @Schaeff55

You’re not getting a haircut, you know. When you choose to fly United Airlines, you are literally entrusting your life to a corporation you assume will take on the responsibilities of air travel in a competent, professional manner. It’s time to rethink those assumptions.

Greetings, passengers. Meet your pilot:

It’s not the least bit funny. At what point does political correctness stop and a common-sense desire to have mentally stable personnel at the controls of the plane kick in? Does being in tune with the lockstep fashionable agenda of the times really take precedence over actual survival?

From a June 2021 interview with Maya Tallman in United’s official in-flight magazine:

Maya: When I got hired at United, I hadn’t transitioned yet and wasn’t “out” to my coworkers. I was still in that place where I knew who I was, I was comfortable in my own head, but in professional settings I was still male. I didn’t start as a visibly LGBTQ+ person; I became one about two years ago. I could not have asked for or hoped for it to have gone any better. Basically 100 percent of the people I work with, they get it. They understand that this is about the importance of authenticity to one’s mental health – the importance of being whole by having that alignment is so important for your mental health.

The sheer recklessness with customer lives here should be shocking. M. Gallegos, a “Senior Coordinator” of operations at Indianapolis International Airport, was also interviewed in the same article as part of United’s observation of Pride Month. Gallegos asserts that having the proper progressive views on racial and sexual identity makes for good flying:

M: I am truly inspired by how LGBTQ+ youth keep pushing forward to make the vision bigger and more progressive, to include trans and nonbinary communities of color, to highlight the struggles of undocumented youth, and much more. They realize that it starts from the grassroots, and much of their hopes to create a better world come from asking questions and listening to the most vulnerable. It comes down to always learning. And that kind of persistence and spirit is exactly what leads to success in aviation.

And here you thought aviation was about being able take off, keep the plane in the air and land. Shame on you.

This is not conjecture. This is not a political argument. Adults who identify as transgender have a staggeringly high propensity to attempt suicide. Here’s a 2023 report from UCLA Law School’s pro-homosexual Williams Institute:

A new study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law finds that 81% of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide, 42% of transgender adults have attempted it, and 56% have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury over their lifetimes.

Let’s spell it out as clear as can be: When you have a transgender pilot manning the controls of the flight you are on, there is an 8 in 10 chance that that pilot has seriously contemplated killing himself. Oh, and you also get a free non-alcoholic beverage. Enjoy.

Tragically, one of these sad transgender adult suicide statistics involves a flight attendant heralded by United in its soulless pursuit of corporate woke gratification.

The Denver Post reported last March (the paper insisted on inaccurately describing the man involved as a “she”):

A transgender United Airlines flight attendant celebrated after she appeared in a 2020 company Trans Day of Visibility commercial has died at age 25, Colorado authorities confirmed Friday.

Police found the body of Kayleigh Scott in the house where she was living in Englewood, south of Denver, early Monday, Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office senior medical investigator Shannon Sanamo said. She died by suicide, Sanamo said.

Scott in 2021 emerged as a high-profile transgender activist.

The article makes clear that United seized on this troubled soul to score progressive brownie points:

In the United Airlines commercial titled “United – Kayleigh’s Story,” Scott declared “I am trans and I am proud” and said she was telling her story publicly “not for me but for those out there who are still fighting social norms.” She said, in the commercial, that “my life changed for the better when I came to United as a flight attendant.” She credited loving coworkers for helping her “break free” and said she was “living confidently as my true self.”

United is unsurprisingly showing similar disregard for passenger safety in focusing on race and female body parts as essential qualifications for its air captains:

Ask yourself this question as if your life depended upon it, because it does: Do you really want to fly with a company that fixates on the color and gender of those it graduates from its very own flight training school? From a Jan. 2022 United press release:

United, the only major U.S. airline to own a flight training school, officially opened United Aviate Academy today and welcomed a historic inaugural class of future pilots, 80% of whom are women or people of color. United Aviate Academy is a key part of the airline’s goal to train about 5,000 new pilots at the school by 2030, with at least half women or people of color. This unprecedented training commitment will dramatically expand access to this lucrative and rewarding career while upholding United’s world-class safety standards.

Thank goodness for the second half of that last sentence. Surely United would never seek to implement its progressive ruling establishment cultural agenda at the expense of individual human safety? Bad news, folks. It’s already done it, to the extreme.

United Airlines was perhaps the most singularly cruel private employer bully on workplace vaccine mandates during the coronavirus hysteria. CEO Scott Kirby was personally praised by Joe Biden when the installed president infamously unveiled his federal worker vaccine mandate in Oct. 2021:

I’ve spoken with Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines, who’s here today. United went from 59 percent of their employees to 99 percent of their employees in less than two months after implementing the requirement. Ninety-nine percent….

Here’s Kirby bragging about his strong-arm tactics to CBS that same month:

I tried to be empathetic, and I do understand. There’s a lot of people that have a different view on this. I tried not to argue with them about it. We’re not going to win the arguments on this with people. Really to say my responsibility is to try to do the right thing for United Airlines and what I think is safe,” said Kirby. “I respect that you have a different opinion. But you now have a decision to make about whether you want to get vaccinated and stay at United or not.”

The way Kirby uses the term “empathetic” is highly disturbing. It evokes a paternalism and ultimately a deep-seated disdain for the personal concerns of the employees at his mercy under pain of job loss. He tried to give a damn about those concerns, really he did.

Fast forward to today and the other shoe may finally be about to drop for the man who pressured United workers into being injected with an experimental gene therapy wrongly labeled a “vaccine” that poses significant health risks, including death.

Breitbart reported Jan. 13:

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby and upper management expressed animosity toward religious employees who sought exemptions from the company’s draconian coronavirus vaccine mandate, internal company communications have revealed.

A legal brief filed early Saturday [Jan. 13] in part of a larger lawsuit against the airline contains internal communications obtained in discovery, which show management’s effort to coerce religious employees to take the coronavirus vaccine at every turn. The effort was so blatant that one union president, Craig Symons, expressed to Kirby and others that United was “over the line” and attempting to institute a “purge of religious orthodoxy,” the brief revealed.

The news site notes the brief lays out the deep animosity Kirby is alleged to have had for the religious sentiments of United workers:

At the outset, Mr. Kirby threatened employees to “be very careful about” requesting such accommodations because “very few”  people would “get through the medical and religious exemption process.” And Mr. Kirby derisively described such employees as “all [of a] sudden decid[ing] I’m really religious.” Making his plans clear, Mr. Kirby warned that anyone who applied for an accommodation was “putting [their] job on the line.”

Scott Kirby’s coronavirus vaccine coercion program revealed that United’s progressive agenda comes before the personal welfare of company employees. So perhaps it was inevitable that this same callousness would be unleashed upon customers as well.

United Airlines is willing to risk your life to play out its culturally leftist daydreams. At what point do Americans say enough is enough?

Does the plane they are traveling on have to fall out of the sky and plummet to Earth before the passive and inert citizens of this country finally decide that they will not go along with this madness anymore? Well, that is one kind of an awakening. Alas, it’s bound to come to a rather abrupt and obliterating end seconds later.


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