Felicia Franklin is suing the state of Georgia for what appears to be a wild night out gone wrong. Felicia Franklin claims she was given a date rape drug, rather than the five drinks that witnesses say she consumed, and that she was treated poorly by medical professionals who were there to help her.
00:00:56.460We're live broadcasting out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building here at the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C.
00:01:03.740And the devil went down to Georgia, not looking for a soul to steal, but maybe a county commission seat.
00:01:09.520That is the allegation in a recent lawsuit from Felicia Franklin, who was the vice chair of the Clayton County Board of County Commissioners.
00:01:19.860She was running for chair to lead that local government when she had an unfortunate encounter with law enforcement.
00:02:19.300The woman you just saw having the mother of all episodes is Clayton County Commissioner Felicia Franklin,
00:02:25.360What appears to be a wild night out gone wrong, however, could turn out to be far more complicated once she's coherent enough to share her version of how everything went off the rails.
00:02:36.160But regardless of how she got to this point, the consequences Felicia will ultimately face will not be fun.
00:02:45.680Gene on Rumble says, now I know what the devil looks like.
00:02:48.660So the allegation here is that this county commissioner was somehow given the date rape drug rather than the five drinks that witnesses indicate that she had had at a nearby sports bar that she was found outside of.
00:03:05.340But now she is suing, claiming institutional racism for how she was treated by those health care professionals who were there to help her.
00:03:13.860So always interesting to check in on what is going on in the state just north of mine in Georgia.
00:03:18.660That is apparently the state of your local government.
00:03:22.160From that to global government, we have increasing concerns about what is being taught to students in Gaza and in other areas where the United Nations is really pushing a curriculum that drives incitement.
00:03:35.820And if there is any hope for a Middle East without this type of intergenerational conflict and hatred, you've got to break that cycle with young children,
00:03:47.720with minds that are not somehow lashed to all of these historical grievances and religious strife.
00:03:57.940The UN schools that exist in Gaza, in parts of Judea and Samaria, are part of the problem.
00:04:07.160And the best evidence for that is what you hear directly from the young people who are attending those schools.
00:04:14.220Listen to these really troubling, hateful pronouncements from children directly as a result of the flow of your tax dollars to the UN, to this very hate.
00:14:23.660This might not be the Republican fighting force that all of us would have hoped.
00:14:28.380But we got to go to war with the army we have, not the army we want.
00:14:32.920And when I went to try to get the FBI headquarters, the brand new building larger than the Pentagon,
00:14:39.440out of the budget, prohibited from being constructed, 70 Republicans voted with the Democrats and the FBI.
00:14:48.180So, like, you know, we are going to hold Speaker Johnson to account on spending reductions to the border and doing everything we can to defang this government.
00:15:00.500But keep in mind, he is the speaker, not the dictator.
00:15:05.320And if you've got a lot of these so-called Republican members working with the Democrats on these things,
00:15:21.320But now we have tens of days to deliver on the real stuff we've got to do on the border, not Ukraine's border, our border.
00:15:31.020And that will be the fight where I'll need all of you to try to put some sort of courage and rigor into the Republican effort
00:15:39.980that I think has been rightly critiqued as lackluster to date.
00:15:45.920One thing that I wanted to have as a centerpiece of this report to you is a growing concern I have about what's going on in the sky.
00:15:55.440You don't have a choice when you participate in air travel in the United States as to the quality of your air traffic controller.
00:16:04.200There's not like an option for you to say, I'll pay extra to make sure that the people directing my plane into the airport are competent and capable and trained.
00:16:18.960You get whoever the government put there.
00:16:21.440And increasingly, that is leading to very dangerous skies.
00:16:24.940There was a report that concerned me greatly that I read at revolver.news.
00:16:31.360You'll know Dr. Darren Beattie is the publisher of that website.
00:16:35.060He joined me moments ago to talk about crash landing.
00:16:39.640And we should all be concerned about DEI in the skies.
00:16:45.780We are joined now by one of Firebrand's favorite guests, Dr. Darren Beattie.
00:16:51.420He is the publisher of Revolver News, which you can find at revolver.news.
00:16:55.500And recently, I was reading an incredible investigative report, a styled crash landing, the inside scoop about how COVID and affirmative action policy gutted aviation safety.
00:17:08.340And after I read this piece at revolver.news, I turned over to my wife and said, I never want to fly in an airplane in the United States of America again.
00:17:17.280And Dr. Beattie, I want to get into the causalities in a moment.
00:17:21.080But before that, how would you describe the current state of aviation safety?
00:17:30.640Well, you know, it's complex because on one hand, we've gone a very, very long time without a major catastrophic commercial aviation disaster.
00:17:44.740But the other part of the equation, which we address in this comprehensive and very in-depth piece, is that the number of close calls, events that aviation professionals call runway incursions, where two airplanes almost collide into each other on the runway,
00:18:04.960or what they call loss of separation events in the air, near mid-air collisions, both of which, as a result of air traffic control error, these incidents have skyrocketed and, in fact, have doubled in the past decade.
00:18:24.860So on the one hand, we don't have any catastrophic accident.
00:18:31.640But on the other hand, the close calls are multiplying and doubling over the past decade.
00:18:37.020And in recent months, there have been just a series of absolutely incredible close calls in the Austin airport and other airports across the country of just really shocking incompetence displayed by our air traffic control professionals.
00:18:58.580You talk about the dangers in Austin, Texas, and I think you even quoted one of the pilots in the piece who said they're trying to kill us in Austin.
00:19:13.900You're supposed to listen to the air traffic controllers.
00:19:15.840But the confidence that the pilots have in the air traffic controllers is absolutely diminishing, and justifiably so, because of this series of near catastrophes that have resulted directly and very starkly from egregious and almost unfathomable incompetence from air traffic controllers.
00:20:02.200The COVID hiring freezes dramatically impacted the quantity.
00:20:08.320Now, we've spoken to a number of aviation professionals, a number of FAA officials, former spokespeople, the whole range.
00:20:17.520Very few wanted to speak about it at all.
00:20:20.980Still, you know, a few more said, okay, we'll talk about background.
00:20:25.460We got one former spokesman called McCormick who was willing to answer some questions.
00:20:32.060But the level of obfuscation and really delusion was quite remarkable.
00:20:36.240But we did get him to admit that COVID hiring freezes played a dramatic role in the understaffing epidemic in the air traffic control profession.
00:20:48.040So, you know, long time ago, we've spoken about this on Firebrand Revolver did a major investigative piece using the life years metric as a means of analyzing whether the lockdown policies made sense.
00:21:02.300Well, we didn't even take into account the fact that these unnecessary hiring freezes due to COVID could have resulted in, you know, the next major aviation disaster.
00:21:14.300The spokesperson was much more tight lipped and I would say deceptive maybe when it comes to acknowledging the role of the vaccine mandates in particular.
00:21:28.440But even if we set those aside, simply the effect of the hiring freezes, I think, is a loan to really further condemn the COVID hysteria, which, you know, we're still feeling the ramifications of that.
00:21:45.080So that's for the quantity. As for the quality, we trace a lot of the diminution of quality to pretty dramatic changes that were put in place by the Obama administration effectively to court more diversity.
00:22:00.180They entirely dispensed with the merit-based test that was sort of like an SAT, but for air traffic controllers, they got rid of that entirely in favor of a test that gauges what they call bio data, which is a huge scam.
00:22:16.660We track its source to this woman who's a professor of AR, believe it or not, that actually exists.
00:22:24.560Entire dissertation. She was sort of spearheaded this. Her entire dissertation was on how to use bio data scam in order to basically increase diversity in hiring practices.
00:22:39.440And so that's what we get. And the pilots that we spoke to and aviation professionals pretty much all said, yes, this has led to a discernible and conspicuous decline in quality from what we had before.
00:22:53.140It is a perfect storm of danger because on one hand, whether it was the VAX mandates, whether it was the hiring freeze, or frankly, whether it was just the cultural adoption of working from home,
00:23:09.220it hollowed out all this experience that we had, these experienced air traffic controllers would leave for one reason or another.
00:23:17.580And then the backfill are all these DEI hires who didn't have to do the rigorous merit-based testing.
00:23:26.940I read this, and I am wondering why there is not a long line of whistleblowers coming to Congress, going to the Aviation Committee to express their concern.
00:23:37.700I mean, you detail in the piece how reticent people were to speak candidly with you about this.
00:23:43.940Why aren't more people sounding the alarm?
00:23:45.840Well, it's unfashionable, and it's career death for many.
00:23:52.220You know, they have benefits, they have their careers on the line for this, and nobody really wants to hear it because by now it's a very, you know, systemic problem.
00:24:02.740And it takes a long time, actually, to train air traffic controllers.
00:24:06.020That's the other side of it for the understaffing is there was the COVID hiring freeze, but then there was also a massive surge in retirements as a result, you know, in the COVID era.
00:24:18.360Now, they could pretend like that has nothing to do with the vaccine mandates, but I think given the available evidence, and there were studies of pilots who were extremely reluctant to take the vaccine in numbers that were significant.
00:24:34.400Attribute any reason you want, but there was a marked increase of retirements as a result of the COVID policies enacted in addition to the hiring freezes.
00:24:44.600So it's kind of cutting it from both sides there.
00:24:47.540And as you point out, the ones that remain very low quality hired on the basis of these new effectively diversity mandates.
00:24:55.920And just to give you a sense of how absurd it is, we opened the piece with one of the most egregious near accidents, the runway incursion, they call it, of a Southwest plane that almost ran into a FedEx plane.
00:25:13.820And the air traffic controller who's responsible for this, and this isn't just like, oh, this is super complicated, but he made a mistake, but it's like, no, no, this is very, very avoidable mistakes, extreme incompetence.
00:25:27.740This guy went back to the air traffic control just weeks later.
00:26:03.980And it gets to sort of the more, I guess, philosophical or contextual side of the story.
00:26:10.640We contextualize this report in terms of what we call the collapse of our ability to maintain complex systems.
00:26:20.680Now, you have a lot of people, you know, technologists, people like Peter Thiel, who've publicly lamented the lack of innovation in our economy outside of technology.
00:26:33.500But this underscores how bad things really are.
00:26:38.400We're not even able to maintain, let alone innovate.
00:26:42.700The complex systems like aviation, like electric grid, transportation, there are a number of different systems that depend not necessarily on geniuses to keep it running, but to competent, responsible professionals with institutional knowledge.
00:27:03.600And our system breaks down at the point of being able to pass down that institutional knowledge to the next generation of competent professionals.
00:27:12.900And we see that in the aviation industry.
00:27:15.740Revolvers address this general issue way back when, remember, when the Texas power grid was having issues?
00:27:23.840I mean, ultimately, this results in a South Africa type situation.
00:27:28.760Now, to get back to the aviation example, which I think is the most shocking because, you know, air traffic disasters really, like, kind of sees us on a visceral level in terms of how terrifying they are.
00:27:44.600You point out there's no way to get around this.
00:27:47.540And normally, the answer to the collapse of these complex systems is, okay, have the tragedy of the commons.
00:27:55.160Every common space is sort of gutted and devolves to the lowest common denominator.
00:27:59.800The very wealthy in society, the ruling elite are, you know, the diminishing numbers of them, but they're able to kind of buy their way out of it.
00:28:09.540The interesting thing about the aviation example is, even if you fly private, you're not able to buy your way out of it because of the problems with the air traffic controllers.
00:28:21.040And in fact, the example, some of the examples that we've given, several actually, involve private aircraft.
00:28:27.880So, interestingly, it's one of these things that even the ruling class isn't able to buy their way out of unless they start to just operate out of entirely different airports.
00:28:37.040But even then, they're dependent on air traffic coordination with the plebs and their commercial aircraft.
00:28:43.960So, it's really quite remarkable in that respect that it's not even one of those things that, you know, if it were an airline issue, say, okay, we're left with crappy pilots, crappy flying experience, all the rich people flying private.
00:28:57.540But for this particular issue, there's no buying your way out of it.
00:29:14.080You talk about solutions in the piece, and you essentially say throw the baby out with the bathwater, that the public sector, government-funded air traffic control system is unsavable and that you believe privatization is something that needs to be seriously considered in order to raise the level of competence.
00:29:34.540Have I overstated how stark you think the options are for us going forward?
00:29:39.680No, I think that needs to be seriously looked into.
00:29:43.400And my understanding is President Trump actually suggested something along these lines, although I'm not sure if he seriously pursued it.
00:29:53.840But I think that's something to look into aggressively.
00:29:56.700But ultimately, the issue is even when you go private, a lot of these laws and pressures remain in terms of the diversity aspect.
00:30:08.120And, you know, we've covered this independently in a discussion of sort of the implications of certain areas of civil rights law.
00:30:18.960For instance, disparate impact law means that any kind of test that leads to a differential impact across racial or gender lines that doesn't correspond exactly with the distribution of the population,
00:30:32.280any such test for an employer is considered to be presumptively illegal on the basis of disparate impact.
00:30:41.400So that's a civil rights law that applies to the private sector as well.
00:30:46.040And so you can't really avoid the underlying pressures even by going private.
00:30:52.400And the remarkable thing is, you know, you think, OK, there's this diversity imperative that exists within our society.
00:31:00.040It's effectively the ideology of the American empire.
00:31:03.560But you would hope there would at least be enough sense to say, OK, let's get the, you know, the diversity hires and have that maybe in the commercials or in areas that are not ultra critical.
00:31:18.140But the fact that we've gotten to the point where we're doing that to the air traffic control indicates that there's a level of insanity and recklessness that really defies the notion that there's something kind of cynical and strategic about the diversity.
00:31:39.880They're like, it's just superficial. It's just for show. But, you know, we still can make the trains run on time.
00:31:45.620This this is about as trains run on time as you can possibly get is making sure the aviation industry works without catastrophic disaster.
00:31:55.040And even that has been compromised, which kind of tells us how crazy things have gotten.
00:32:01.260I miss the simpler days when what I had to worry about most on commercial air travel was bad turbulence, bad weather or bad passengers.
00:32:11.180Now, those all fall below the list. Crash landing, the inside scoop about how COVID and affirmative action policy got an aviation safety.
00:32:21.280One more thing. As far as solutions, this isn't going to be a long term solution, but something that's worth considering.
00:32:28.400There is technology that can compensate to a large degree for the incompetence of the air traffic personnel.
00:32:37.480And not all of our airports have this technology. And the FAA has said this is a result of a lack of funding and all these things.
00:32:47.620So I'm sure there'll be a government contractor who will say that because of the COVID laws that we passed and the corresponding DEI that we backfilled it with,
00:32:57.220we now need to go spend a bunch of taxpayer money to create a technology system to overlay the human incompetence.
00:33:04.900They're already saying that. And so but assuming that there is technology that works,
00:33:09.300it's pretty amazing that we've directed a hundred billion dollars to Ukraine.
00:33:13.760And yet we have airports that lack what the FAA is describing as critical technology to avoid the next aviation disaster.
00:33:21.960So it's just incompetence and corruption piled on top of each other, you know, up to the stratosphere.
00:33:29.640Oh, yeah, sure. Before it's all over, they'll say we actually need to give the money to Ukraine so that we can then glean and learn how to better keep our own skies safe.
00:33:38.060But that will be nonsense. Revolver.news is the website.
00:33:43.060Dr. Darren J. Beattie is the publisher. Follow him at is at Darren J. Beattie on most social media platforms. Right.
00:33:51.120Indeed. On on Twitter is at Darren J. Beattie.
00:33:53.880All right. Great. And Revolver.news. Make sure you are a daily reader as I am.
00:33:57.940Thanks so much, Dr. Beattie. Thank you.