Tucker: Pete Buttigieg is more concerned with equity than the transportation crisis
Fox News host Tucker Carlson reacts to the U.S. grounding all flights and Buttigieg's performance at transportation secretary on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight. So think back two years. It was two years ago that Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, was in a very hard place, really. He was unemployed. He was pushing 40. He was staring down the barrel of a grim and non-productive middle age. For Mayor Pete, the back nine did not look promising. But then help arrived in the unlikely and doddering form of Joe Biden.
Either because of his innate decency or because he has a nasty sense of humor, Joe Biden made Pete Buttigieg the federal Secretary of Transportation, despite the fact that Pete Buttigieg had no relevant experience with transportation of any kind apart from occasionally riding a bicycle with a little helmet. This was a huge promotion from unemployment to the White House cabinet. And understandably, Mayor Pete was full of vim and high-minded ambition as he started his new job. But soon, very soon, came crushing disappointment. Like a homebuyer who discovers that his new house is riddled with termites, Mayor Pete soon learned that the Department of Transportation was on the verge of collapse.
As it turned out, the department had a very serious diversity shortage. Deadly serious. Imagine being adrift in an open boat in the Sargasso Sea and realizing you're down to your final tin of equity. You're about to run out of equity. That's where Pete Buttigieg found himself in January of 2021. That's not the kind of emergency a responsible federal appointee could ignore. And fortunately for our nation, Mayor Pete did not ignore. He took swift action.
FAA OUTAGE: BUTTIGIEG RESPONDS TO LATEST TRANSPORTATION CRISIS AS HE FACES CONTINUED CRITICISM
Just months after taking office, Buttigieg located the core of the problem, which, as we now know, was racist roads. "There is racism physically built into some of our highways," Mayor Pete announced. And in his voice you heard the iron resolve of a man who has no tolerance for bigotry and asphalt. And yet, at the same time, you also heard a deeply sensitive man, a man who can feel the hate beneath the wheels of his electric vehicle where others might just hear road noise. Mayor Pete decided to stamp out this hate.
By November of that year, Buttigieg had ordered every freeway overpass in the Bronx expected for racism, and soon, he had preliminary findings. "If an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach in New York was designed too low for it to pass by," he explained, "that obviously reflects racism that would into those design choices." Yeah, obviously. It makes sense. Problem identified. We should point out here, though, that Mayor Pete didn't actually tear down and rebuild these racist overpasses in the Bronx. Construction is not his thing. It was enough to call them racist and move on. That is his thing.
And really, it's core to the new mission of the Transportation Department, which at this point, can be summarized pretty simply. If a single trans woman of color has a bad day in this country, we as a nation have failed. With that credo in mind, Mayor Pete turned his attention to aviation. Now, Mayor Pete, himself, flies private, so he didn't have a tactile, firsthand experience with our crumbling airports or crowded, stinking planes last refurbished in the Clinton administration. But he knew something more important. He knew that the FAA was beset by structural misogyny and transphobia. And to fix that, Mayor Pete had the FAA announce that the aviation system called Notice to Airmen - that's the system that keeps pilots up to date on their flights - that system would change immediately.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, center, speaks during a briefing at the White House in Washington, May 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
Actually, the system itself wouldn't change. It would remain the same. But more important, the name would change. Going forward, it would be called "Notice to Air Missions." "Missions," not "men." Missions. See the massive improvement there. Now we're getting somewhere. So at the beginning of last year, Mayor Pete declared victory. 2022, he said, would be the year that, quote, "every transportation decision inherently is in many ways a decision about equity." In April of last year, Mayor Pete noted that ensuring equity and accessibility for every member of the traveling public is one of the department's highest priorities. So he was on it and the equity crisis was solved.
Unfortunately, our transportation problems were not solved. They had, in the meantime, become much worse. In fact, it reached a point, it is at a point, that you might experience on, say, a trip across Bangladesh. Just today, in fact, the FAA was forced to order a ground stop for all air traffic in the United States. No planes flying in a continental country. First time that has happened since 9/11. Now, the problem affected the newly renamed "Notice to Air Missions" system. More than 10,000 flights were canceled or delayed. How did this happen? Total stop on all air travel. Let's go to the Secretary of Transportation for his assessment.
[VIDEO]
PETE BUTTIGIEG: Now that the system is up and running, our primary focus is to determine that root cause. And I've directed the FAA to figure out exactly how this happened. The timeline, piece by piece, about what was known overnight going into last night and then coming out of it. So glitches or complications happen all the time, but we can't allow them to ever lead to this level of disruption and we won't ever allow them to lead to a safety problem.
Okay. So I'm the Secretary of Transportation and there's no air transportation in the entire country of 350 million people. I have no idea why, but I'm going to, quote, "direct someone" to find out because we can't allow this to happen. Really? Thanks for telling us. We thought we could allow it to happen. Oh, we can't. You're going to direct someone to find out. Yeah, sure.
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But the important thing to know here is that the system that didn't work, the "Notice to Airmen" is no longer called "Notice to Airmen." So it may not actually function. You can't actually fly anywhere. You're earthbound, but you're not transphobic. So air travel is a disaster under the man who's supposed to fix air travel. But it's not just air travel. Have you ridden on a train recently? Have you really? Have you ridden on a train? Well, on Monday of this week at 5 p.m., passengers in Virginia got on an Amtrak bound for Orlando. The car train. They're supposed to arrive by 10 a.m. on Tuesday, but they didn't. Instead, they were stuck on that train for 37 hours because Amtrak, part of our transportation system, could not figure out how to navigate around a derailment. Some passengers called the police thinking they'd been taken hostage.
[VIDEO]
AMTRAK ANNOUNCER: Once again, for those of you that are calling the police, we are not holding you hostage. We are giving you all the information in which we have. We are sorry about the inconvenience. As soon as more information is available, we will let you know shortly. Thank you.
We'd like you to know that we're not holding you hostage. We have all the information, quote, "in which we have."
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