Monday, April 17, 2023

ONE OF JOE'S PROGRAMMED MORONS - Transportation Sec. Buttigieg Repeats Claim that Racist Roads Are Causing Minority Car Crashes

PETE IS AS STUPID AS HE APPEARS. HE'S A CLONE OF JOE BIDEN.

Transportation Sec. Buttigieg Repeats Claim that Racist Roads Are Causing Minority Car Crashes

CRAIG BANNISTER | APRIL 17, 2023 | 10:26AM EDT

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Trans. Sec. Pete Buttigieg (L) on MSNBC (Screenshot)

“A lot of people don’t understand, even down to road fatalities, it is not equal," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Saturday, repeating his claim that racism has made America’s roads deadly to minorities.

"We have a crisis when it comes to roadway fatalities in America. We lose about 40,000 people every year. It’s a level that is comparable to gun violence,” Buttigieg told MSNBC Host Al Sharpton on Saturday, blaming “discrimination” for “disparities” in the number of minority drivers and pedestrians killed on the nation’s roads:

“And we see a lot of racial disparities. Black and Brown Americans, tribal citizens and rural residents are much more likely to lose their lives, whether it’s in a car or as a pedestrian being hit by a car.
"There are a lot of reasons related to discrimination and related to even the ways that roads are designed and built, who has access to a safe street design that has crosswalks and good lighting, who doesn’t have that access that can drive disparities, and we have a responsibility to act on that."

This isn’t the first time Buttigieg has blamed road racism.

In November of 2021, the transportation secretary claimed that “racism” drove the construction of a highway and an underpass in New York:

"I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or that would have been in New York, was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”

Buttigieg doubled down on his accusations later that month in an interview with MSNBC:

"What we’re doing is we are reconnecting people who may have been disconnected or divided by discriminatory decisions in the past. That helps everybody. I don’t know why anybody would be against reconnecting people who have been divided by discriminatory decisions in the past.”

Pete Buttigieg just can’t stop calling highways racist

By Thomas Lifson

Our Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg can’t tell us enough times how racist our highways are. Pete prefers bicycles (even if he has his bicycle dropped off at a spot near the White House so he can be photographed riding a bike to work there without working up a sweat).

And, of course, railroads, the subsidy-loving choice of central planners.

The last time Pete attacked highways as racist was in 2021.

US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg said highway designs in the country were “racist,” and claimed that the new infrastructure bill would help fix it. (snip)
This was in reference to his earlier stand that racism was “physically built” into highways.
“I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighbourhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would have been — in New York was designed too low for it to pass by, that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” Mr Buttigieg responded.

Unfortunately for Pete:

Conservative commentators quickly pounced on Buttigieg’s remarks, leading Washington Post writer Philip Bump to point out that Buttigieg was merely talking about a well-known story from Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” his massive and authoritative biography of Robert Moses. In the book, Caro alleges that Moses designed the overpass bridges on the Southern State Parkway leading to Jones Beach too low to be used by buses that would carry poor minorities there.
To Bump, it was “not only obviously true that American governmental bodies used infrastructure spending as a way to bolster both directly and indirectly racist policies, but it is an equally obvious truth that such systemic decisions have often been ignored in the teaching of the country’s history.” And such omissions were why, Bump maintained, something like the 1619 Project was needed.
But then, in a burst of journalistic honesty, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler walked back Bump’s remarks, claiming that the newspaper “knee-jerked” in its defense of Buttigieg. Kessler had heard from several historians who urged caution in using the story about Moses and the bridges. “Buttigieg should tailor his remarks to reflect what is historically unimpeachable — and we should be more careful to double-check on the latest views of historians,” Kessler wrote with remarkable judiciousness. “Even a Pulitzer Prize-winning book is not always the last word on a subject.” (snip)
Caro said that he got the information about the bridges from one of Moses’ engineers. But Ken Jackson, the dean of New York historians (and my former adviser), pushed back against the claim. “Caro is wrong,” Jackson told Kessler. “Arnold Vollmer, the landscape architect who was in charge of design for the bridges, said the height was due to cost.” Jackson added that there were many ways to get to Jones Beach by train and bus that avoided the supposedly lowered parkway overpasses. The North Shore Bus Company published a bus schedule specifically for Jones Beach in the summer of 1937; it had a number of daily routes from Flushing to Jones Beach. It figures that Pete would hold onto a half-century old anecdote claiming

It figures that Pete would latch onto a discredited anecdote from half a century ago to accuse his least favorite mode of transportation as racist. And even after debunking, he can’t let go of the idea that racism and automobiles are two peas in a pod.

Speaking with famed Jew-hater, pogrom-instigator, and all around racial strife-monger Al Sharpton, Buttigieg opened a new attack of racist highways. They cause victim class minorities to have more traffic accidents.

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