The Incompetence of Evil

The Marxist radicals running the so-called “Biden Administration” have made it their number one priority to celebrate sinful defiance and rebellion against God’s created sexual order.  Each appointment is lauded not for the competence of the person appointed to government office but for their sexual predilections. 

Last week, Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was beaming and bragging about how the new White House Communications Director, Ben LaBolt, will be the first openly gay White House communications director.  Isn’t that wonderful!  Last summer, it was the lesbian Jean-Pierre herself who was being celebrated as the first openly gay White House Press Secretary.  Yay!  Amazing!    

One gets the impression, especially when viewing Karine Jean-Pierre in action, that whoever is pulling the strings of the “Biden Administration” doesn’t care whether a person can competently perform their job so long as in their personal lives (which sadly are not private) they rub uglies with someone of the same sex. 

Which brings us to the story of Pete Buttigieg (pronounced “BOOT edge edge”).  Bottigieg’s father, Joseph A. Buttigieg II, a Maltese academic, is famous for having translated and edited a three-volume English edition of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's “Prison Notebooks.”  Gramsci was the pioneer of what today is called “cultural Marxism,” which includes critical theory and especially critical race theory, which not coincidentally is the type of Marxism being taught in our schools, colleges, churches, corporations, NGOs, bureaucracies, the military, and every other American institution. 

Pete Buttigieg went to Harvard, then joined the navy, taking a post in naval intelligence. Then he returned home and got elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana, famously calling himself “Mayor Pete.”  Then he decided to run for president in 2016. The powers that be in the Democratic Party decided that Biden would be the candidate, and Buttigieg was given the consolation prize of Secretary of Transportation.  Did he have any training or competence in transportation?  Well, no, but he had something more important to the celebrators of perversion: he had a “husband.”

Buttigieg was “married” to Chasten Glezman, a junior high school teacher, on June 16, 2018, in a private ceremony at the Cathedral of St. James.  Glezman now uses Buttigieg’s surname.  With his Democratic Party credentials and his homosexual credentials, Buttigieg had a lock on some position in the “Biden Administration.”  They decided on transportation. 

How is that working out for us? 

From the start, Buttigieg was completely uninterested in transportation; his overriding obsession was race.  Buttigieg has been weirdly obsessed with race since he took office. 

Buttigieg reinstated an Obama-era pilot program designed to help minorities get government contracts.  In February, 2021, Buttigieg addressed the African American Mayors Association to discuss systemic racism. He argued that misguided investments in the federal transport and infrastructure policy had contributed to racial inequity.  In early March 2021, Politico—a Left-leaning political journal—noted that Buttigieg had mentioned racial equity in almost every interview he gave to the press.  In late June 2022, Buttigieg launched a $1 billion Reconnecting Communities pilot program to establish racial equity in roads.  

Perhaps his most comically absurd claim was that the bridges crossing over roads to public beaches were intentionally built too low, with insufficient clearance for buses to pass under them, specifically to prevent black children from taking the bus to the beach. [See note below] 

In the middle of the supply chain crisis, with container ships backing up off the coasts of our ports, Buttigieg took two months of paid paternity leave--maybe to help breast-feed the fraternal twins he and Chasten had adopted? Because we all know that men breast-feed, and if you deny that you’re a bigot who needs to be canceled.

Under Buttigieg, air travel has become a nightmare.  Last year he was still insisting that commercial air passengers stay masked at all times, even though the science is clear that masks do not stop or appreciably slow the spread of the Wuhan Flu, when a federal judge mercifully intervened and struck down the mask mandate.  Commercial air carriers, with the encouragement of the government, are increasingly contemptuous of their customers, whom they treat as cattle on the Chisholm Trail, torturing them as much as possible along the way.

 

The Ohio Train Derailment

At 8:55 p.m. on February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio.  Tanker cars containing chloroethene (vinyl chloride), butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, isobutylene, combustible liquids, and benzene residue were piled up willy-nilly alongside and over the tracks. 

After two days during which hazardous chemicals were leaking into a stream that sheds ultimately into the Ohio River—fish were killed by the thousands--emergency crews conducted a “controlled burn” of several of the tanker cars.  This created toxic clouds containing hydrogen chloride and phosgene into the air.  Residents within a 1-mile radius were evacuated.

The scale of the environmental disaster is not yet fully known, but it is very bad. 

Clearly, Buttigieg should have convened an all-authorities meeting immediately after it became known that there was a train derailment involving toxic chemicals.  The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Michael S. Regan, should have been a key player, since the most crucial decision involved how best to remediate the toxic chemicals with the least environmental damage. 

For Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the East Palestine disaster was the last straw for Pete Buttigieg; he called for Biden to sack him:

“I write to urge you to request the immediate resignation of U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Buttigieg, who has repeatedly demonstrated a gross level of incompetence and apathy that is detrimental to the safety and prosperity of the American people.

“For two years, Secretary Buttigieg downplayed and ignored crisis after crisis, while prioritizing topics of little relevance to our nation’s transportation system. It is painfully clear to the American people that Secretary Buttigieg has little regard for the duties of the Secretary of Transportation.

“At no time has that been more apparent than the past two weeks. Secretary Buttigieg refused to acknowledge the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, until his intentional ignorance was no longer tenable. Even after acknowledging the tragedy, he continues to deflect any accountability for the safety of our nation’s rail system. The circumstances leading up to the derailment point to a clear lack of oversight and demand engagement by our nation’s top transportation official.

“Unfortunately, this is part of a two-year long pattern. During historic maritime and surface transportation disruptions in 2021, Secretary Buttigieg was completely absent. Amidst an impending possible rail strike last year, Secretary Buttigieg left the country to vacation in Portuguese wine country. Near misses in commercial aviation, as well as recent system failures, including the one that shutdown air travel in Florida in January, indicate that serious and persistent problems across the DOT are not being sufficiently remedied. I do not have confidence that Secretary Buttigieg is capable of keeping the American people safe.

Train derailments are becoming increasingly common.  The East Palestine disaster is just one of more than a dozen rail accidents that have already taken in the US since the start of 2023, less than two months.  The accident was not even the first to have occurred in Ohio this year; there was another derailment on January 19 between Trinway and Adam’s Mill, in which 97 cars of the Ohio Central Railroad slid off the rails.  Fortunately, those cars were empty. 

Maybe Pete Buttigieg, as secretary of transportation, should pay more attention to railroad safety issues, esoteric things like how to keep the trains on the tracks.  Sadly, unless someone can find a racial angle to railroad safety, it seems unlikely that Mayor Pete will be much interested. 

Clearly, when you prioritize, in your hiring decisions, publicly celebrating perversion and rebellion against the created order, you do not get competence as a by-product; you get incompetence.  But I don’t think the Marxist radicals running the “Biden Administration” care.  More likely, for them the dysfunction and chaos is a bonus. 

For as I have often told you before, and now say again even with tears: Many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and their glory is in their shame. . . . But our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Phil. 3:21


NOTE: A reader has informed me via email that the story of the racists bridges comes from a reputable source: Robert Caro’s 1,200 page biography of Robert Moses (1888-1981), New York’s most prominent urban planner and public official of the early to mid-20th Century.

Robert Moses left his mark all over New York City. As head of the Triborough Bridge Authority, Moses had near-complete control over bridges and tunnels in New York City as well as the tolls collected from them, and built, among others, the Triborough Bridge, the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, and the Throgs Neck Bridge, as well as several major highways.

The construction of these many bridges and roadways transformed New York City, making it a modern city accessible to automobiles. In the process, however, many tenements and less desirable addresses were destroyed to make way for the roads and bridges, and Moses made many enemies.

As Long Island State Park Commissioner, Moses oversaw the construction of Jones Beach State Park, the most visited public beach in the United States, and was the primary architect of the New York State Parkway System

And this is where the bridge story comes in.

Sidney M. Shapiro, a close associate of Moses and a chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission, told biographer Robert Caro that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the Southern State Parkway, the highway to Jones Beach State Park, to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach—buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans whom Moses despised.

But Moses designed Jones Beach State Park to be accessible to buses. The original site plan included bus drop-off zones, and photographs from the era show buses loading and unloading passengers. “Bus connections with the B.M.T. [Brooklyn-Manhattan Transfer] and I.R.T. [Inter-Borough Rapid Transit Company] in Brooklyn make the park easily accessible to non-motorists,” reported the Brooklyn Eagle when Jones Beach opened in 1937.

So whatever racial animus might have existed in Robert Moses’ heart, it did not prevent subways, trains and buses from transporting people from New York’s densely populated boroughs out to Jones Beach.

We are discussing some of America’s first real highways, built in the 1920s. The Southern State Parkway was begun in the summer of 1926 and copied from even older highways in Westchester County, including the Bronx, Hutchinson, and Saw Mill River parkways.

These roads were set in broad park-like greenbelts, with grade-separated intersections and access limited to interchanges. When Moses created the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924, he turned to Westchester County for guidance, recruiting the genius behind its vast park and parkway system—Gilmore D. Clarke. Clarke agreed to be a consultant, which is why the Southern State Parkway—the first Robert Moses parkway on Long Island—is nearly identical to those Clarke laid out north of the city.

The parkway concept was just what the name implies—a way through a park. It was designed to both literally and figuratively remove you from claustrophobic urban feel of the city, to be a park for motorists. Berms and lush plantings screened off city blight that would break up the reverie, creating an almost cinematic impression of driving through a pastoral landscape. Important components of this stagecraft were the low-slung stone bridges, which were intended to create a sense of romantic rusticity.

Commercial traffic was excluded on all the early American parkways. This meant not only trucks, but buses. Banning big, noisy commercial vehicles was essential to the aesthetics of the parkway, and had nothing to do with racial discrimination. There would have been no need to use the rustic stone bridges along the Southern State Parkway as physical obstacles, because buses were not allowed on that or any other parkway.

Does all this mean that Sidney Shapiro’s story is false? No, it might well be true. A man named Thomas Campanella measured the bridged clearances on the Southern State Parkway and found them on average more than a foot lower than the clearances of the earlier Westchester County parkways on which it was modeled, so maybe Shapiro was right.

But maybe he was wrong. Ken Jackson, the dean of New York historians, pushed back against the claim. “Caro is wrong,” said Jackson. According to Ken Jackson, Arnold Vollmer, the landscape architect—hmmm, a landscape architect; there is that “park way” concept again—was in charge of the design of the rustic stone bridges, and Vollmer said that the heights were lowered for budgetary reasons, to save money.

Jackson also stated (as we noted above) that there were many routes to Jones Beach on trains, buses and other public transportation that avoided the Parkway overpasses. For example, 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 is very likely that Robert Moses was a racist. We are talking here about the 1920s, when racism was widespread and generally accepted. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the dean of early 20th Century American paleontology, who named the Tyrannosaurus rex, wrote in 1926, the same year the Southern State Parkway project was begun:

“The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolians, as may be proved by an examination not only of the brain, of the hair, of the bodily characteristics . . . but of the instincts, the intelligence.  The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old-youth of the species Homo sapiens.”

We are talking about a century ago. A lot can happen in a century, especially if that century was the 20th Century. For “Mayor Pete” to still be obsessing about a road built a century ago by a man who has been dead for over forty years is beyond eccentric. It is, in fact, malevolent. It demonstrates that Pete Buttigieg is as fully committed to the cultural Maxist tactic of using America’s imperfect racial past as a weapon to bludgeon it to death as his father was before him, and as the subject of Joseph Buttigieg’s life work, Antonio Gramsci (who invented cultural Marxism) was before the elder Buttigieg.