Charlie Kirk was killed on September 10th, and since then I’ve seen a lot of awful stuff he said being shared on social media. He was a right-wing personality with a lot of conservative and right-wing followers. The first things I saw about him were the “change my mind” memes, but I didn’t know his name yet.
I later listened to him on Gavin Newsom’s podcast on March 6th because I saw a Tiktok video saying how transphobic it was and I thought I should listen and see for myself. It was pretty bad: Charlie kept calling trans girls boys and trying to get Newsom to agree that trans girls should be banned from competing in girls school sports. Newsom pulled the classic politician move of appearing to agree but not making any commitments. So, that was great. Thanks Gavin Newsom for standing up for trans people (/s).
I saw plenty of videos of Charlie Kirk going viral on YouTube this summer and I probably clicked on a few but I couldn’t stand to hear him talk so I didn’t listen to more than about a minute of them.
And then he got shot on campus during one of his speaking events where he invites college students to take the mic and try to change his mind about his right-wing views. The way he died was pretty horrifying: nobody should be killed for expressing their beliefs, particularly not in that manner.
Like I said, after his death, I saw a lot of terrible things he said and started mentally collecting them because many conservatives were saying they had never heard him say anything bigoted. Some people have been trying to lionize him as a clean-cut, respectful young man who only wanted to combat polarization between the left and the right by starting honest conversations about important issues.
You can probably tell, but I disagree with that view of him. In his interviews, he talks over his interlocutors, asks gotcha questions, strawmans, and overwhelms opponents with information and statistics that are difficult to refute on the spot. If you listen to him long enough, you can tell that he doesn’t have much esteem for people who don’t fit the conservative cookie cutter mold.
The bigoted quote of his that stood out the most to me was:
“If I see a black pilot, I’m gonna be like, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.”
I didn’t understand how that could possibly be justified in context.
I looked it up and the original context for the quote makes it worse, not better.
Here’s the original context:
Kolvet: We’ve all been in the back of a plane when the turbulence hits or when you’re flying through a storm and you’re like, “I’m so glad I saw the guy with the right stuff and the square jaw get into the cockpit before we took off. And I feel better now, thinking about that.”
Kirk: You wanna go thought crime? I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.”
This was on the podcast Thoughtcrime, “Episode 29: DEI or DIE?” which livestreamed on Rumble January 18th, 2024. This came out the day after America First Legal (AFL) filed a lawsuit against United Airlines for its DEI policies, including its stated goal to accept 50% women and/or people of color to its proprietary pilot school, United Aviate Academy.
The whole vibe of the podcast is nauseatingly racist.
During the podcast Charlie Kirk says:
“I don’t want Laquisha James who’s like, *falsetto* Hi, ladies and gentlemen. Pray for me.”
He was probably referencing Letitia James, New York’s attorney general who signed a letter in 2023 encouraging Fortune 500 companies to retain and expand their DEI programs despite Republican District Attorneys’ earlier letter alleging that DEI is unlawful discrimination.
He also says:
“They’re hiring a bunch of blacks for no reason at air traffic control.”
*gagging noises*
The podcast is mostly them fearmongering, saying airplanes are going to be falling out of the sky because pilots are going to be hired because of their skin color and not merit.
It’s not true, which I’ll explain later, but even if it were, how could they possibly know that there are not enough competent female and black pilots to fill the positions at United Airlines?
It’s true that only 9.6% of pilots are women and 88.3% are white (Bureau of Labor Statistics), but how would you know that there aren’t enough qualified candidates without being a hiring manager and looking at the applicant pools? Or at least having some access to data about how many candidates there are and their level of competence?
I think it is prejudiced to assume that because there are so few pilots of color and women pilots currently employed that there are not enough qualified pilots of color and women pilots out there.
I don’t agree with Charlie Kirk that DEI policies mean that companies will hire less qualified candidates. If I were a hiring manager, to me DEI would mean that if there are two equally qualified candidates and one is a white man and one is a minority, I would hire the minority. I personally would not hire someone who is less qualified just because they’re a minority.
Racial discrimination in hiring can be difficult to detect. Few interviewers are going to be obvious in their discrimination. Some interviewers may not even realize they are selecting who they are selecting based on racial bias (unconscious bias). It would be difficult to tell either 1) how many women and minorities are missing out on pilot jobs because interviewers are biased in favor of white men or 2) how many women and minorities are getting chosen for pilot jobs even though they may be slightly less qualified than their white male counterparts.
Usually only the hiring managers would know if they discriminated in their candidate search because the applicants typically don’t know who they’re applying against, who ends up getting the job, or why that candidate was selected.
I’ll entertain that hiring managers may pick candidates that are slightly less qualified – I seriously, seriously doubt that hiring managers would pick candidates that are significantly less qualified or unqualified because United Airlines is a business and I don’t think they would do something that would ultimately harm the company or put passengers at risk in service of social justice.
On top of that, it’s widely said that the dropout rate for flight school is 80%, so there’s a significant selection process happening before pilots are even eligible to apply for jobs in the industry. There are also plenty of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulated hard skill tests and certifications that pilots need to pass to progress through the different levels of flight school. Flight school costs about $100,000 and can take anywhere from 1-4 years depending on the program.
You can’t just walk in and apply for a job as a pilot, which is why I thought Jack Posobiec comparing United Airlines’ DEI program to a supposed incident in the Soviet Union where a political apparatchik allowed his kids to fly a plane full of people into a mountain while he was sleeping was especially egregious. Even if United Airlines were hiring less qualified minority pilots it wouldn’t be anywhere near the level of literal untrained children.
In fact, that Soviet airplane crash story seems to be anti-socialist propaganda. Aeroflot Flight 593 happened in 1994, after the Soviet era which ended in 1991, and Kudrinsky was a professional pilot with almost 9,000 flying hours. He meant to let his kids pretend to fly the plane, but his 15-year-old son accidentally disengaged the autopilot. The first officer tried to correct course, but pushed the plane into a spin that the pilots weren’t able to recover from. The plane didn’t crash because Kudrinsky was hired for political reasons, it crashed because he put too much trust in the plane’s technical safeguards.
Maybe Jack meant something else, but when I look up “Russian plane crash kids in cockpit” that’s what comes up.
I think Kirk’s comments were irresponsible because they may have encouraged conservative viewers to unfairly malign or harass black pilots. I did see one troll comment on a nineteen-year-old white female applicant to United’s Aviate school’s YouTube video parroting Kirk’s talking points.
There’s more context here on Snopes. Charlie Kirk says, “that’s not who I am”, blaming affirmative action for making him question the competence of black pilots. I don’t think that excuses his comments because I disagree with his underlying premise that minority race being considered as a positive characteristic during the hiring process must lead to less qualified employees being hired.
Anyway, in a later video on a college campus, Charlie Kirk tries to re-contextualize what he said on the Thoughtcrime podcast:
“This was in response, first and foremost, to United Airlines saying that half of all their new pilots that they’re going to hire are going to be women or people of color. Currently they’re 15%, okay. So they want to go from 15% to 50%. A conversation then ensued about how every time affirmative action is employed, standards have to be lowered. There is not a single instance where that does not occur. So then I said, boy, if I see a black pilot, I’m now going to wonder, is that individual qualified or were they selected because of their race? But that’s not who I am, but that makes me think this way. And I stand completely by that statement.
Secondly, DEI and affirmative action lowers the merit, lowers the threshold of standards, and increases things that do not matter such as skin color and ethnic background.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 11.7% of pilots are not white and 9.6% of pilots are female. You could add them together to get 21.3%, but that doesn’t account for the overlap of pilots who are female people of color, so the number would be somewhat less than that. 15% is probably a decent estimate.
The part that’s really misleading is that Charlie Kirk says that United Airlines is trying to hire 50% women and people of color to its entire pilot corps.
That part is explicitly untrue – the United Airlines affirmative action program, which set an ambitious goal to accept 50% women and people of color, applied only to its United Airlines Aviate flight school program.
The Aviate flight school program, which began instruction for its initial class in 2022, is the only flight school in the United States owned and operated by a major airline. Because of its brand name and the straightforward career path it promises, it appears to be very competitive to get into, receiving over 12,000 applications in its first year.
Its first graduating class of 2023 included 51 students, 80% of them women or people of color (39% women and 69% people of color).
The percentage of women and people of color was high, but the size of the class was on the small side. United hires about 2000 pilots per year, so if they hired the whole class, that would be 2.5% of their new hires. That’s significantly lower than the 50% Charlie Kirk quoted.
To be fair, Aviate Academy’s 2024 class included 380 students, which would be 19% of new hires, assuming United hired all of them.
United does have a company-wide DEI hiring policy in that they make an effort to try to hire diverse employees, but it seems to be more of a cultural push than a concrete goal. The America First Legal suit outlines some other policies of United, but none are as dramatic as its goal to diversify the Aviate school. They include things like reducing biased language in job postings and making sure 90% of interview slates include diverse candidates.
I don’t think United’s affirmative action policy at their Aviate Academy or their broader DEI policies compromise standards or pose a threat to consumers. I believe Charlie Kirk and the other guys on Thoughtcrime were making big deal out of a fairly small, benign effort to diversify aviation.
I think it’s racist to assume without evidence that DEI policies necessarily entail a drop in standards. It’s one thing if you can point to data that says that there aren’t enough qualified candidates or that the women and POC candidates are significantly less competent than their white male counterparts, but to baldly assert that DEI policies result in a drop in standards appears to rest on the racist assumption that white men are inherently better pilots than women and POC.
It’s especially racist to say that women and POC prospective pilots are less qualified than white male pilots before they enter flight school, at a stage when prior flying experience is not necessary for admission (I will admit that if Aviate Academy has a preference for pilots without prior experience, that would be a little worrying, but not panic inducing because hopefully they would receive adequate training in the academy).
In sum, the context makes Charlie Kirk’s comment about black pilots worse, not better.
I would stop there, but United’s Aviate Academy is deserving of scrutiny, too…
Aviate Academy’s first class (2022-2023) started with 30 students and ended with 51. The dropout rate for flight school is often quoted at 80%, so how did the class get larger by the end? And if students were added later, how did they have time to complete the program, especially considering it’s only one year?
On the graduation page, it says that 84% had no previous flight experience, but when you look at the Success Stories page, almost all of them had fairly extensive experience prior to starting at Aviate, coming from other airlines, flight schools, universities, or countries.
On the Success Stories page, about 60% of the profiles highlighted are of white men (20 white men, 10 POC men, 2 white women, 2 POC women, 34 total). There are also 5 legacies (2 white men, 2 POC men, and 1 white woman). Only two (6%) had no prior flying experience before starting at Aviate.
On March 19th, 2025 twenty-four former students filed a class action lawsuit against Aviate for not providing students with enough instructors and planes to graduate on time. They allege that Aviate then expelled students for taking too long to finish, leaving them thousands of dollars poorer with little to show for it.
It seems exploitative for a flight school to explicitly target women and minorities who are underrepresented in aviation, take their tuition, and then not provide them with enough flight hours to graduate in time.
I hope I’m wrong and Aviate is legitimately helping women and minorities, but what I suspect is happening is that Aviate is accepting two kinds of students: beginning students with little experience, who they give the run around and may or may not give them the training they need to graduate, and pilots who are close to certification who Aviate can give the final approval to and promote as success stories. At least 40% of the latter are women and minorities, but that would still be a bad situation if it were true.
The lawsuit alleges that Aviate voluntarily withdrew from its certification organization for enrolling 382 students, 44 students over its enrollment cap of 338. Rather than do the responsible thing and restrict enrollment, United Aviate is looking for a new certification organization.
Charlie Kirk and his ilk panic about airlines making decisions based on DEI, but at the end of the day, airlines are capitalist businesses and their highest priority is always going to be their bottom line, for better or worse.
By the way, if there is any real reason for decline of standards in pilot hiring, it would be the pilot shortage. During COVID, many older pilots retired. Now that air travel has picked back up, there is high demand for pilots but short supply.
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