Fox News’ Tucker Carlson hinted at a new conspiracy theory to explain the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and it’s that the train coming off the tracks in an area with a lot of white people was probably on purpose.
“East Palestine is overwhelmingly white and it’s politically conservative and that shouldn’t be relevant, but it very much is,” Tucker is quoted as saying.
Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie, co-hosts of The New Abnormal politics podcast, agree on the latest episode of their show that arguing against this type of thinking with logic is futile, but they give it a go anyway.
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“Where do these train tracks get put down? Usually in areas that are overwhelmingly rural, overwhelmingly low-income, and where these derailments happen, you hope, ‘Oh, no one will really care.’ You don’t see train tracks running through affluent areas. So to me, this is actually really a conversation about class and capitalism and deregulation than it is one of the white identity. But leave it to Fox News and Tucker Carlson to find something else to whine and complain about,” says Moodie.
But Levy throws even more logic out there.
“He won’t put any of the blame for this on Trump,” he says. “And again, it’s been very well documented, if this train had had this different kind of brake, there’s at least a decent chance it would’ve stopped the derailment, or there’s a greater chance that it would’ve made the derailment less severe. The Obama administration wanted these trains to have that, those kind of brakes. They ended up having to drop their requirements to a different level because of lobbying by the rail industry. And then Trump just got rid of the braek requirements altogether.”
Also on this episode: Moodie and Shay Khatiri, senior policy analyst at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, debate whether the attacks on Nikki Haley’s name are valid based on Shay’s recent opinion piece for The Daily Beast, “Stop Being a Jerk About Nikki Haley’s Name”.
Khatiri thinks it’s stupid to go after her name. Moodie thinks it’s fair game.
Plus! Jennifer Wright, author of the book Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist, tells Levy all about the badass woman from the 1800s who got rich—and infamous—helping women have abortions and not killing them in the process.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
