This meme makes it seem like a group of troops are volunteering to fly abortion seekers around the country. The truth is much different, less impressive and mostly unrelated to the meme.
▪️Elevated Access is a volunteer pilot network that seeks to fly people in private aircraft to access abortion and “gender-affirming care.” It has no affiliation whatsoever with the military, and volunteers couldn’t wear their uniform or use military assets in any way.
https://elevatedaccess.org/about
▪️The organization claims to have 800 pilots who’ve volunteered to fly for them, but it’s unclear how many are from the military. The article bringing this to light simply says this:
🔹”The group does not know how many of those have current and former ties to the military because the application does not ask about their military background. But, some pilots have voluntarily shared their military backgrounds or sent photos of themselves in a military uniform.”
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2022/09/us-troops-are-volunteering-fly-abortion-seekers-across-state-lines/377604/
▪️So, maybe there are a handful of veterans or active duty members that volunteered, but it’s certainly not a group of troops doing this, nor does the organization have any affiliation or mention of troops on their website. It’s a manufactured story, any relation is incidental.
▪️Overall, the charity seems to be sort of a gimmick. From their website, they only list one flight launched, from Oklahoma to Kansas back in June. Which shortened a woman’s potential 5 hour drive to 10 min plus a 90 min flight, plus a ride share to the clinic.
https://elevatedaccess.org/news/elevated-access-flies-its-first-passenger-to-get-abortion-services
▪️One would assume they would list the amount of flights taken and women served if it was meaningful, but there’s no mention of it. As for the pilot volunteers, there is no obligation to perform any services, they are just signing up as a part of the network.
▪️In almost all circumstances, it would be far more efficient & cost effective to book an airline ticket or drive to the nearest clinic. Any charity seriously focused on providing access to services would go that direction. Offering private flights seems geared towards attention seeking.
▪️The requirements for pilot volunteers are only 200 hrs and a private pilot certificate, so beware. This isn’t a commercial outfit, recipients are guaranteed little more than an airplane ride from someone they don’t know, who might not be qualified to fly into inclement weather.
https://elevatedaccess.org/pilots
▪️This quote concerning their pilots might also give people some pause 😂
🔹“The easiest part is checking their pilot credentials,” Mike said. “The other part is having them send in statements of support for abortion and gender and affirming care, as well as talking to two references from them about their support for those things.”
https://www.flyingmag.com/hundreds-of-pilots-sign-up-to-provide-transport-for-womens-medical-care/
▪️It should also be noted this charity incorporated in April, before the leaked Dobbs decision even made news, so it wasn’t started initially in response to that.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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