Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg managed to blame traffic accidents on racism during an interview with MSNBC’s PoliticsNation on Sunday.
"A lot of people don’t understand, even down to road fatalities, it is not equal," host Al Sharpton said to Buttigieg, prompting him to concur.
"It’s something that deserves more attention, which is why I’m working to bring more attention to it,” Buttigieg began, channeling his inner Kamala. “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. 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," Buttigieg continued in response.
One of the lesser discussed consequences of the “defund the police” movement and other local governments that prohibited police from doing their jobs has been a massive decline in traffic enforcement. The pullback was greatest in minority communities, and as such they suffered the greatest increase in traffic fatalities during a nationwide surge that began in 2020. As a study recently published in the National Bureau of Economic Research noted, there wasn't much of a racial disparity in traffic deaths between whites and blacks since "at least the 1970s," and a racial disparity didn't even begin to arise until the Ferguson Effect kicked in back in 2014.
While some have pointed to the pandemic as a factor in the increase, this increase in traffic fatalities wasn’t seen in other countries that had far stricter lockdowns than the U.S. Deaths per million miles traveled remain 18% higher overall today than before the pandemic, while Japan, Germany, and the U.K. all saw double-digit percentage declines. The difference was that the U.S. reduced traffic enforcement, in many places on the sole basis that such enforcement was "racist" because minorities were disproportionately fined. And because of the “heads I win, tails you lose” game that is progressivism, the consequences of reducing enforcement are inevitably blamed on racism as well.
Last year Buttigieg argued that highways are racist, saying at a press conference, with a straight face: “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 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.”
Amazingly, the fact-checkers then rushed to provide cover. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler said that the claims were backed up by a book on urban developer Robert Moses called The Power Broker. Kessler learned of the passage from his colleague Philip Bump, who wrote an entire article defending Buttigieg that quoted from The Power Broker. Then, two days later, Kessler suddenly realized it was BS and tweeted out: “ADDENDUM: Experts increasingly doubt this story,” which was accompanied by an article he wrote explaining that it turns out this story about roads and bridges “has largely been debunked.”
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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