Let's say there's a pool of 20 candidates, 10 male and 10 female. Since more men than women have an abiding interest in engineering, let us posit that 40% of the men are top prospects for the job, and 20% of the women are equally high-quality workers. The company is trying to fill 6 roles and has an internal mandate to hire 50% women. To serve that mandate, 1 unqualified woman will be hired, at the expense of 1 of the qualified men.

You can apply the exact same logic w/r/t race. Yes, there are legacy-of-slavery reasons why fewer blacks than whites are qualified for any given technical credential, but those are upstream of hiring decisions, and are not the job of e.g. airlines to solve, especially not at the expense of lowering standards for a crucial position like pilot.

You’re grossly failing at basic logic here. One case is describing racism and one being racist. Those things are not the same.

> They don't believe that there are black people who are qualified…

Again, you’re failing at basic reading comprehension but now it looks intentional.

I am not an expert in Charlie Kirk (I barely knew anything about him a week ago), but from the many many clips I have seen of him since, he seems to me to genuinely not be racist.

It's not worth debating whether DEI and affirmative action are problematic are not. We probably disagree, and this is a waste of both of our time. But in terms of this story, the simple fact is a journalist should not be misquoting someone. If one thinks he's racist by subtext, one can try to argue that, but at least be honest about what he's literally saying.