The hazardous chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent acknowledges in a Feb. 21 column, is “a story about profit-driven rail companies underinvesting in safety, lobbyists weakening rail regulation, and the government’s failure to assure residents’ security from lingering toxins.” Seemingly unilaterally, the corporate media refuse to engage in good faith with concerns from the right about the crisis; The New York Times even described right-wing criticisms as though they were overly cynical.
And even though the liberal pundit Sargent is willing to acknowledge the current presidential administration may bear part of the blame for this humanitarian and ecological crisis, he avers that “what’s objectionable is the right’s deliberate racializing of this story.”
Even amid an apolitical tragedy, the corporate media make the right the bad guy.
Tired Newsflash: Liberal Attacks Conservatives on Race
Sargent is referring to various comments by conservative pundits and Republican politicians who have tarred Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as being negligent and abandoning working-class white communities in favor of woke policies. Buttigieg earlier this month complained about construction projects in “neighborhood[s] of color,” where “everyone in the hard hats on that project, doing the good paying jobs, don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood” — or, in other words, too many white construction workers. Tucker Carlson, Sen. J.D. Vance, and Charlie Kirk, among others, unsurprisingly pounced on the secretary’s controversial comments.
Cue Sargent’s finger-wagging in his op-ed, provocatively titled, “The right fans a repulsive campaign to racialize the
