By Janet Levy
If you experienced unprecedented delays during air travel this summer, the airlines likely blamed it on the weather. You might have been surprised, for bad weather wasn’t reported in the news. But here is what should surprise and shock you even more. The real reason – a shortage of pilots and air traffic controllers (ATCs) – is linked to the Great Reset, the agenda to control people and restrict freedom conceived by the global elite and being implemented through leftist groups and their sympathizers.
It is now well known that Klaus Schwab, chief of the elitist World Economic Forum (WEF), set the Great Reset in motion during the pandemic, calling it an opportunity to “reflect, reimagine, and reset the world.” The COVID lockdown also connects to the story of the recent flight delays, because it was during the pandemic that travel restrictions were imposed worldwide and pilots and ATCs were laid off. At London’s Heathrow, alone, for example, traffic plunged 88% – from 80 million passengers daily to about one million. The ostensible reason for limiting travel was to curb contagion and virus mutation. But a sinister agenda was afoot.
The travel restrictions, quarantines, vaccine passports, social distancing, the lockdown itself, and other measures were not so much for disease control as for imposing the dystopian New World Order. COVID was a smokescreen. In the name of a recovery plan, radical steps were initiated to restructure the world economy and usher in an extreme environmentalist and statist framework of governance as the new norm.
As the lockdown progressed beyond a few months, proponents of the climate agenda and the Green New Deal claimed an intersection between the pandemic and a furtherance of their goals. These ‘progressives’ deployed a double-edged sword: they said decreased air and car travel was contributing to a healthier planet; simultaneously, they warned that global warming would contribute to health problems and even start more pandemics. So, the pandemic became a convenient excuse to justify far-reaching policy changes that would control and direct everything from the utilization of natural resources to the movement and monitoring of people.
The implementation of movement restriction measures called for in the Great Reset has already manifested in several ways. Air travel is being discouraged with the inconvenience of delay, cancellations, and staff shortage. Other movement is being checked by a policy thrust toward banning gas-powered cars, instituting congestion pricing, and developing the impractical idea of so-called 15-minute cities. These policies also call for car-free cities, limiting airline travel, and a ‘global tax’ on airlines, that is, the more you fly, the more you pay. In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered the Air Resources Board to ban new gas-powered cars by 2035, linking heatwaves, wildfires, and droughts to “climate change.” Seventeen states that have vehicle emission standards tied to California rules are weighing similar mandates.
In 2022, the 193-member nation International Civil Aviation Organizations (ICAO), a U.N. agency, agreed to a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Ironically, the call to reduce the use of aviation fuel is accompanied by a boom in private air travel, as airline travel becomes more difficult. Private jets constitute 25% of U.S. flights and increased by 17% in the first half of 2022. Clearly, despite purported concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, the Great Reset does not restrict travel for the elite. The agenda obviously has more to do with politics and control than science.
This year, summer air travel was subjected to massive delays. More than 11,000 flights were delayed or cancelled on June 25; some 8,000 on June 26; and there were 35,000 flight delays and 7,000 cancellations on July 4. Candid airline employees confessed this had nothing to do with the weather, and that pilot and ATC understaffing was responsible for the chaos. In late June, I found myself stuck in New York for three days with no available flight options to the West Coast. I was also trapped in Reykjavik for four nights because of the cancellation of flights to Ilulissat, Greenland. An Icelandair captain revealed the reason: a tower at an adjacent airport, required for potential flight diversions, was unmanned because of an ATC shortage.
Despite the shortage of aviation personnel, Congress rejected an amendment to HR 3935, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill, that would have required airlines to reinstate pilots who were fired or stepped down because of vaccine mandates. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who introduced the amendment, said, “Hundreds of pilots were forced out of their livelihoods over the past several years for their refusal to get the COVID vaccine.” Surprisingly, 83 Republicans joined their Democrat colleagues in voting against an amendment that would have ameliorated the pilot shortage.
The FAA has been criticized for lacking a plan to address the serious shortage of ATCs: 77% of critical air traffic control (ATC) facilities are staffed below the 85% threshold. Currently, controllers are working mandatory overtime and six-day weeks to cover shortages. The shortage of about 3,000 ATCs has been responsible for large numbers of flight cancellations and delays. The fact that the FAA paused training in the wake of the COVID pandemic has added to the already serious problem, compounded by the diversity agenda.
Under the Obama administration, the FAA furthered diversity goals by screening applicants using biographical questionnaires that supplanted skills-based tests. Former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson had then reported that applicants with lower aptitude in science were being preferred over those who scored high in science. Similarly, applicants who were unemployed for the previous three years got more points than licensed pilots. As Carlson rightly put it, the FAA was actively searching for unqualified ATCs, prioritizing identity politics before passenger safety and ultimately reducing the available pool of ATCs.
The resultant delays and restrictions bring to mind the post 9-11 commissioning of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security and how it was insidiously expanded, using the fear of terrorist attacks, to serve a state that is becoming increasingly authoritarian. A parallel could be drawn with how the pandemic and the supposed menace of climate change are being used to get people to accept without question the need for surveillance and other restrictions on freedom.
In the name of rooting out terrorists, the TSA began by having its airport staff probe and prod ordinary Americans, including children and the wheelchair-bound elderly. Its mandate now covers the entire transportation landscape, including all surface transport systems. From 26,941 screeners in 2014, the number has leapt to over 60,000 today. Travelers are now inured to surveillance and willingly submit to scans, pat downs, and other intrusions. The globalist elite and their progressive cohorts hope that, similarly, with the fear of new pandemics and end-of-the-world climate scenarios on their minds, people will acquiesce to giving up their freedom and living as directed by states that are in the control of the elite.
With the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring climate the number one threat to world health in the 21st century, conditions are now in place for the centralized control proposed under the Great Reset. This amounts to the weaponization of the weather to bring about a Sinification of America under one-party rule. It is high time people became aware of the true objective of the climate agenda: curtailing and monitoring human activity and allowing the elite to ultimately control all resources by working through so-called experts who make decisions without accountability. Before it goes any further, this blatant attempt to seize liberty and extinguish freedom must be stopped.