Sen. Roger Marshall comes out as racist and sexist with DEI take on D.C. plane crash | Opinion
By his own reckless comments about last week’s crash of a Wichita-to-Washington jetliner, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall showed himself for what he really is — racist and sexist.
We also now know that there is no Kansas tragedy too profound for him to exploit to curry favor with the presidential administration of Donald Trump.
Marshall is a highly educated man, a practicing physician and OB-GYN before he became infected with the virus of alt-right politics and its current obsession with destroying DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion.
But he has been saying and doing dumb things in Congress for a while. Among them was siding with the Jan. 6 insurrectionist mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election (1,500 members of which were pardoned by Trump shortly after he took office), and helping spread the false rumor that COVID-19 vaccines contain “aborted fetus parts.”
I always thought it was more of an act than anything else — pretending to be a Jethro to try to come off as more relatable to the ignorance-is-strength wing of the GOP back home.
This week, I’m abandoning that hypothesis.
I do so after Marshall echoed and expanded on Trump’s theory that DEI was the real cause of the Jan. 29 D.C. plane crash, where an Army helicopter collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 on approach to Reagan National Airport, and 67 people died horribly as both aircraft plunged into the frigid waters of the Potomac River.
Finding fault
At a press conference this week in a bar across the street from the Kansas Capitol in Topeka, Marshall lashed out at a longstanding Federal Aviation Administration policy of seeking out qualified minority and women applicants for air traffic control positions.
His comments were informed by his own extensive experience with air traffic operations. “I’ve been in the Air Traffic Control Office there in Olathe,” he said.
“You know they’ve been short of air traffic control since I ran for Congress,” Marshall said. “And this is what I think you’re going to find out, is there were a lot of qualified white men that they were not hiring because they were holding spots for DEI hires.”
That’s one theory.
Another, with significantly more evidence behind it, is that control towers are understaffed across the nation because the Congress that Marshall is part of has chronically underfunded the air traffic control system.
Quoting from the 2023 National Airspace System Safety Review Team report:
“Funding for air traffic services has essentially remained flat for the last five years, while demand for these safety-critical services has rebounded significantly from the lower air traffic levels seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the proliferation of emerging entrants (more planes) continues to add complexity in the air traffic system. This is not to say that the system is unsafe; however, system efficiency is suffering and funding challenges are eroding the margin of safety and increasing risk in the system, which is unsustainable over the long-term.”
Marshall also talked of his own unease when he boards an airliner and the pilot doesn’t look like what he thinks an airline pilot should look like.
“I never walked into a jet, looked at the pilot — and I do, I look at the pilot every time (to see) who’s flying this thing — I never said there, ‘Oh, I hope that’s a DEI hire.’”
Possibly sensing that he had just said the quiet parts out loud, Marshall added this comment: “I don’t care if it’s a guy or a girl, what color your skin is, it needs to be a qualified person.”
Gee, Senator. That’s mighty white of you.
The year of Trump
There was a time when Kansas political figures who made such sexist and racist statements would be, oh, I don’t know, frowned upon, maybe?
Like a few years ago when the late state Sen. Kay O’Connor of Johnson County unironically questioned whether women should have the right to vote, and was subsequently crushed in a Republican primary for secretary of state.
Or current state Sen. Virgil Peck of Havana, who once caught heat from 25,000 Kansans — including as conservative a figure as former GOP Gov. Sam Brownback — for quipping that if shooting crop-damaging feral hogs from helicopters worked, “maybe we have found a (solution) to our illegal immigration problem.”
It turns out O’Connor and Peck were just ahead of their time.
This is the year of Trump, and these days, anything goes. The more insulting and reprehensible the statement, the louder the cheering from stage right.
Marshall’s comments are as baseless as O’Connor’s and Peck’s were, because there’s nothing on record to indicate that anyone involved in the D.C. crash was there because of DEI.
And even if they were, every controller has to pass years of rigorous training, testing and practice at smaller airports to earn a seat in the tower at a major commercial airport.
Furthermore, the implied inferiority of minority and female pilots was disproved decades ago.
Stay safe, Senator
Since it’s Black History Month everywhere except in some federal agencies where the Trump administration has banned it, it’s probably worth noting that the winners of the first military aviation “Top Gun” competition, way back in 1949, were Black.
They were Tuskegee Airmen, from the segregated unit of Black pilots who battled the Nazi Luftwaffe over Europe in World War II, and they outperformed the best of the all-white squadrons despite flying obsolete planes, according to a historical article on Military.com.
The Pentagon suppressed news of their triumph for 46 years, with the 1949 winners recorded as “unknown” in the annals of the competition until 1995. Their trophy was held in storage until 2004 and the airmen didn’t receive full recognition until 2022.
Speaking of history, there’s a statue representing Kansas heroism in the National Statuary Hall, at the Capitol where Marshall works.
It’s a statue of a woman pilot, female aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.
Returning to the present, Trump held his own anti-DEI show last week at the White House.
In it, his new defense secretary, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, let it slip that the Army helicopter that collided with the plane over D.C. was on a training flight, practicing “continuity of government” operations.
Continuity of government is the plan for using military aircraft to evacuate the important people — including Roger Marshall — to safety in case of a nuclear attack on Washington or similar catastrophe.
So, to Sen. Marshall: If we ever go to DEFCON 1 and you have to skedaddle out of Washington, you probably ought to plan on waiting around for a helicopter with an all-male, all-white flight crew.
We certainly wouldn’t want you to have to worry about having your life saved by a “DEI hire.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2025 at 11:56 AM.
