An old video clip of U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg peddling a falsehood about the design of bridges and overpasses has resurfaced thanks to the End Wokeness X feed.
The height of such structures built in the early 20th century is racist, he said in 2021, and designed to stop buses — used mainly by blacks — from entering white communities.
Fact checkers challenged Buttigieg’s claim at the time. Its re-emergence has gone viral and at this writing has pulled almost four million views.
The clip’s new life demonstrates not only the Biden administration’s obsession with race and sowing racial division among Americans — no matter how ridiculous the method — but also the willingness of its top officials to create fake news to justify their radical agenda.
The Claim
Buttigied told the Big Lie in November 2021 when he announced a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill “to address racial inequities in U.S. highway design,” as Axios put it at the time.
The program was called the “Reconnecting Communities Act,” which the nation’s most prominent homosexual described this way:
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’ve been — in New York was — was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.
I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality and I think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it.
Buttigieg retailed the same bogus history the following summer. Said Buttigieg:
We‘ve also seen countless cases around the country where a piece of infrastructure cuts off a neighborhood or a community because of how it was built.
We can’t ignore the basic truth: that some of the planners and politicians behind those projects built them directly through the heart of vibrant populated communities. Sometimes as an effort to reinforce segregation. Sometimes because the people there have less power to resist. And sometimes as part of a direct effort to replace or eliminate Black neighborhoods.
The Facts
When Buttigieg announced the Reconnecting Communities Act and claimed that infrastructure was designed to segregate blacks from whites, “right-wing” Twitter exploded. A user asked for The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler to fact-check the claim, obviously knowing what Kessler would find.
Buttigieg’s claim “was obviously a reference to one of the most famous anecdotes in Robert Caro’s majestic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker,” Kessler wrote, having backed Buttigieg on Twitter with quotes from the book.
Moses was an urban planner, and at one time one of the most powerful men in the country, with a major influence on New York’s roads and highways, including those in New York City.
“Caro also cast Moses as a racist who made it harder for people of color to visit his properties,” Kessler explained. “Buttigieg referenced one of the book’s most famous anecdotes, which appears on pages 318 and 319.”
This is Caro’s claim:
[Moses] began to limit access by buses; he instructed [Sid] Shapiro [chief of the Long Island State Park Commission] to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, who he considered inherently “dirty,” there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, especially to Moses’s beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted off to parks many miles further on Long Island. And even in those parks, buses carrying Negro groups were discouraged from using “white” beach areas — the best beaches — by a system Shapiro calls “flagging”; the handful of Negro lifeguards (there were only a handful of Negro employees among the thousands employed by the Long Island State Park Commission) were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out.
Caro and his wife even tracked the number of blacks who went to Jones beach and supposedly confirmed Moses’ intent, Kessler explained.
And the New York Historical Society tweeted that Moses’ design condemned “anyone who could not travel by car — including lower income families and people of color — to a long journey over local roads, effectively barring them from Moses’ parks.”
But after initially backing Buttigieg, Kessler retreated.
He quoted two authorities who said that Caro was wrong, whatever Moses’ personal beliefs.
One of them explained that bridges and overpasses at the time were customarily built low, and that “Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country.”
Another said “Caro is wrong,” and that bridges and overpasses were low because the higher they are the more costly they are. As well, buses and trains could indeed get to Jones Beach.
Nothing Has Changed
Not surprisingly, the tactics of Biden, his underlings, and their mainstream-media information ministry are unchanged.
Just last week, Biden repeated the lie he told in 2020 that Donald Trump told Americans to “inject bleach” to kill the China Virus. Trump did no such thing. Nor did Trump, as Biden claimed, call the virus a “hoax.”
Also last week, the media went with a major lie about Trump to help Biden. Headlines about a speech in Dayton, Ohio, claimed that Trump said that re-electing Biden would end in a “bloodbath,” which clearly implied that Trump advocated violence or civil war.
In fact, Trump used the term to describe what would happen to the auto industry.
Biden repeated the lie on X.
