Don’t tell anyone. Remember, I know where you live and where your friend lives now.”
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Lyft, the ridesharing company, released information admitting to 4,158 sexual assaults from 2017 to 2019. And each year it got worse. Lyft ended up paying out a $25 million settlement to shareholders over disclosures involving, among other things, driver sexual assaults. And since then the lawsuits have kept right on coming.
And so the company, known for its pink color scheme and progressive politics, is taking action by rolling out its Women+ Connect program offering “rides for women by women”.
But since Lyft’s politics are woke, the women aren’t actually women. Instead it’s a potluck of women, men who claim to be women and “nonbinary drivers”. Women requesting a female driver, in the hopes that they won’t be one of the 292 Lyft female riders and drivers subjected to rape in 2019, the 1,041 who fought off a rapist driver or the 573 otherwise molested will have the luck of the draw as to whether a woman pulls up or Roy who changed his name to Regina.
Behind the wheel may be a woman or a man (or as Lyft angrily and falsely insists “transgender women are women” or nonbinary which, according to the rapey app consists of those crazies who “may identify as being both a man and a woman, somewhere in between or as falling completely outside of these categories” which is to say that they may be absolutely anybody.
Lyft doesn’t mention that it initiated Women+ Connect because of all the rapes. Instead it highlights how “diverse communities are stronger”, which is an odd way to describe women, and offers the promise of “good vibes, conversations that turn into friendships” and “a nod that says ‘I get it.'” And preferably not a sexual assault by one of Lyft’s thousands of rapists on wheels.
For a measure that’s meant to let women pick female drivers, Lyft prioritizes its partnership with the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ lobbying group formerly backed by Harvey Weinstein who, if he gets out, will have few career options except as a Lyft driver. HRC’s former president was ousted for helping former Gov. Cuomo fight allegations that he sexually harassed women.
Partnering with HRC, an organization that’s been tied up with sexual predators, seems like an odd choice for Lyft, but so does emphasizing the companionability of women being around women, and then surprising them with HRC’s row of transgender and nonbinary men.
Lyft could have actually implemented a Women+ Connect program limited to women, but instead it chose to prioritize its woke politics over the safety of its female passengers.
This is typical of a woke corporate culture in which politics matter more than customers.
While women were being raped in Lyft sedans, the company deployed Lucky Lyft, a trivia game show in which Bob the Drag Queen, actually Christopher Delmar Caldwell, a large bearded black man who must be referred to as “she” and “her”, strutted around in pink “surprising unexpected riders” with an opportunity to win some money by answering questions.
One trivia question Lyft has not been willing to answer is the number of sexual assaults in 2023. I have reached out to the rideshare company and was told that these were “the latest publicly available report” numbers. Implicitly, Lyft has some private sexual assault figures it’s not sharing.
Meanwhile, there continue to be “unexpected surprises” for Lyft riders resulting in lawsuits.
A lawsuit from a Pheonix woman in 2022 described a Lyft driver proposing to smoke meth before grabbing her phone and sexually assaulting her. The driver told her, “Don’t tell anyone. Remember, I know where you live and where your friend lives now.”
Not that sexually segregating riders and drivers offers any firm guarantees.
A Kansas woman got into a Lyft rideshare vehicle with a female driver. Unfortunately also in the car was her husband who had “an extensive criminal record, including convictions of aggravated assault”. And then allegedly both husband and wife “violently raped” her and stole her things.
The lawsuit does not mention if either husband or wife identified as nonbinary at any time.
A common theme in a number of Lyft sexual assault cases is alcohol. I’ve had rideshare drivers tell me that they get very intoxicated young female passengers heading home from bars. And a lawsuit described rideshare forums where drivers talk about how to take advantage of them.
There are common sense precautions to take but the same woke culture that insists that men can be women also argues that taking those precautions is “victim blaming”. But reality has no politics. The reality is that a man will never be a woman and that women need to be aware of the risks of being out in public around men (whatever their alleged binary or gender) while getting intoxicated during a time of rising crime rates and falling law enforcement.
Lyft, like most dot coms, manufactures the illusion of service as a seamless experience defined by app interfaces, buzzwords and graphic design. In reality most dot coms depend on low paying grunt work from dubious people to make the service actually work. Bright colors, smooth lines and cheerful animations when we push a button condition us to be dazzled by the surface rather than understanding that electric cars require dirty rare earth mining, that your photos stored in the cloud are sitting on servers in miserable conditions (and only private to the extent that no one in the chain of access cares about them) and that content moderation is handled by third worlders with a passing knowledge of English who spend all day wading through porn.
The gig economy is even worse because it makes paying people a few dollars to run errands seem like magic when all it does is monetize the free time of random people to service the whims of the laptop class for late night takeout or rides home at 1 AM. None of this is safe.
How could it be?
Woke politics form a crucial part of the corporate illusion that takes the gig economy from little more than offering a random stranger twelve bucks to drive you home into something reliable.
Lyft is committed to DEI and ESG. It brought in Obama’s close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, as a board member. After the drug overdose death of George Floyd, it “committed to becoming a bigger part of the solution” by focusing on “inclusion and diversity” and hiring black people.
Like Bob the Drag Queen.
And it even promised to donate money from protest rides to a variety of groups, including Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and the National Bail Fund Network, which bails out criminals, including rapists.
In 2020, the Massachusetts Bail Fund, whose motto is “free them all”, put up bail for Shawn McClinton, who had already been convicted of rape once, who had then broken into a ladies room, grabbed a woman, dragged her into the men’s room, and raped and strangled her.
When the bail fund cut him loose, he went out and raped another woman. At least unlike Waleed Alkhuwaylidee, a Lyft driver who could only speak Arabic, and was accused of raping a woman before making a run for the Canadian border, he didn’t do it in a car.
When Lyft isn’t paying to free rapists, it’s promising to protect women from them by finding them female drivers or mentally ill male ones. Rather than prioritize protecting women, Lyft puts its politics first and women second. But while Lyft may not offer women safety, it can offer them the nonbinary driver of their dreams.
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