The GOP Plays the Race Card with a Train Wreck

By David Corn  February 25, 2023

The day after a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, 2023, it still burns. Gene J. Puskar/AP

Shortly before the midterm elections, I was reviewing the statements of J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican who would soon win a Senate seat, and I discovered that he had concocted a populist brew blending working class resentment and white racial grievance. In various interviews, Vance contended that unidentified elite plutocrats were conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they were) to shut up Middle America. He claimed these nefarious and powerful interests used false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face. In his narrative, there was no legitimate debate about race and America. Instead, unnamed fat cats brand patriotic Americans racists to preserve their own riches and to keep legions of hard-working but struggling white Americans under heel. Critical race theory, in his view, was a bludgeon deployed to “control people,” and “white privilege” was a “lie used to silence” working-class Americans.

This is how Vance put it in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham:  

Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback form the real people.

This is deft demagoguery, conflating legitimate concerns about economic power with racist paranoia. It goes beyond the usual crass GOP playbook of waving the racism card, instead fusing toxic culture wars to bread-and-butter issues. I don’t know if this sly maneuver—assailing wokeness as the weapon of the 1 percenters—was responsible for Vance’s Senate victory. But it sure didn’t hurt. And in the days since the horrific train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Republicans and right-wingers have been beating this drum.

Fox News host and conspiracy theory-pusher Tucker Carlson made this clear eleven days after the accident. “East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative,” he said on his show. “That shouldn’t be relevant but as you’re about to hear, it very much is.” He went on to explain: “If this had happened to the rich or the ‘favored poor,’ it would be the lead of every news channel in the world. But it happened to the poor town of East Palestine, Ohio, whose people are forgotten, and in the view of the people who lead this country, forgettable.” His message: the good folks of East Palestine were being screwed because they were white.

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent found other examples of the racialization of this chemical spill:

One Fox News host [Jesse Watters] suggested the Biden administration is “spilling toxic chemicals on poor white people.” Far-right personality Charlie Kirk decried a “war on white people” waged by the “Biden regime,” which is supposedly allowing the “poisoning” of “citizens of eastern Ohio.” Note the hints of the ugly trope that elites are plotting to exterminate Whites, or at least allowing them to perish.

This fit nicely with another racist notion that Carlson, Kirk, and other far-right extremists have been pushing: Liberals are trying to replace white people with dark-skinned immigrants.

Of course, Vance got into the act. He blamed the Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his Department of Transportation’s racial equity initiatives for the catastrophe: “I’ve got to say, the Secretary of Transportation…talking about how we have too many white male construction workers instead of the fact that our trains are crashing…This guy needs to do his job.” 

There is so much wrong with all of this. It’s preposterous to have to say this, but anti-white racism was not the cause of the derailment or any problems with the subsequent response. As my colleague Arianna Coghill noted, “It was Norfolk Southern, the rail company behind the crash, that chose not to update its ‘Civil War-era’ brakes. It’s Norfolk Southern that refuses to give its workers paid sick leave, while simultaneously refusing to hire enough workers. Meanwhile, the company made $4.8 billion in operating profit last year.” And it has greased the system, spending about $100 million on lobbying and political contributions over the past three decades.

When Trump visited East Palestine a few days ago—and handed out red MAGA hats—he proclaimed its residents were victims of a “betrayal.” He didn’t explicitly say this was due to anti-white racism, but his use of that word synced up with the the-powers-that-be-hate-white-people narrative of Carlson, Vance, and the others. All of this is probably effective for Republicans because Trump is right in one sense: Working Americans have long been betrayed by corporate America and its handmaids in local, state, and federal government. This obviously includes white, Black, brown and other shades of Americans. In fact, Black Americans are 75 percent more likely to live near facilities that produce hazardous material and are exposed to high levels of air pollution than white Americans. Yet only when white people are potentially harmed by a toxic chemical spill does MAGA land express outrage at the injustice of it all. (How many Fox segments have there been on the terrible impacts of brownfields and toxic polluters in minority communities?)

MAGA extremism thrives by feeding and being fueled by supposed white victimization. It ignores how the GOP and the right have long waged war on all Americans. During his presidency, Trump called for weakening or smothering assorted regulations that protect Americans in their homes and at their workplaces. It’s unclear whether a proposed regulation regarding train brakes that the Trump administration blocked would have prevented this calamity. But the former guy and his party have consistently sided with Big Business—the elites!—and opposed health and safety rules that protect Americans of all economic status and skin colors. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018, Trump bragged, “No president has ever cut so many regulations in their entire term as we’ve cut in less than a year.” The audience cheered. Yet now he speaks of betrayal.

For years, Republicans have had to counter the charge that they are on the side of powerful economic forces that abuse middle-income and working-class Americans. They often fight back with culture warfare, seeking to exploit racism and absurd sideshows. (Look at what the libs are doing to Mr. Potato Head!) Vance has showed them a more, shall-we-say, sophisticated way of stoking a populist anger that melds economic alienation with racial animus. It’s a toxic mix to which President Joe Biden and the Democrats, who have been trying to win back a slice of the white working-class vote, ought to pay close attention.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

An Our Land Focus Group: Do You Wanna Zoom?

Here’s a question for Our Land premium readers: Would you like to join me and your fellow Our-Landers on a video Zoom call when we shoot the you-know-what about whatever is currently happening in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours? In the early Our Land days, we held such a Zoom event, and those who participated had fun, as did I. So, I’m thinking of trying it again. Given that the newsletter’s audience has grown dramatically since that time, we will probably set this up as a feature for premium subscribers (which is a nice way of saying “the folks who pay for the full version of Our Land”). If that’s you and you think this is a good idea—maybe something you’d even enjoy and participate in—give me a shout at ourland@motherjones.com. My initial thought is to host this on a weekend night at 8:00 pm, ET. But feel free to suggest other times. Maybe we could pick subjects ahead of time,  or come with a piece of assigned reading (a book, an article, a tweet) to discuss. What would you like to do? Let me know, and we’ll figure it out.

Dumbass Comment of the Week

The judges this week, while still mulling the traumatic and humiliating loss of Liverpool to Real Madrid in the European soccer championship, were discussing whether the past seven days reached an unusually high level of stupidity. Not surprisingly, we can thank Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Crazytown) for yet again establishing a new level of nuttery, this time by calling for a “national divorce” that would separate red and blue states. In other words, a woman who swore an oath to defend the US Constitution endorsed what the South fought for during the Civil War. She referred to such a “divorce” as the means to avoid a bloody conflict. (“The last thing I ever want to see in America is a civil war ... but it's going that direction,” she confided in Fox host Sean Hannity.) But wait, when I last checked, she was part of the gang that sparked the most violent insurrection attempt this nation has seen since the War Between the States.

To compound her inanity, Greene added this observation to her call for a national breakup: “If Democrat voters choose to flee these Blue states...Well, once they move to a Red state, guess what? Maybe you don't get to vote for five years.”

Greene is a foul force in American politics who embraced QAnon BS and John Birch Society paranoia. It is only thanks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that she gets such an elevated level of attention. Instead of being ostracized, she is amplified. If the judges did not have a mercy rule, she could win every week.

And yet, so, too, could Donald Trump Jr. Look at his latest nonsense:

Here he is trying to excuse the January 6 rioters in epic—here’s that word again—demagoguery. As if Trump’s brownshirts were invited to pummel law enforcement officers, smash windows, breach locked doors, break into the Capitol, ransack the joint, call for the murder of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, and impede constitutional governance and the peaceful transfer of power. He is still trying to gaslight the public and justify the violence of his dad’s terrorists.

But Junior also falls under the mercy rule. No trophy for him this week.

There was a lesser-known contender who made a strong bid: Republican state legislator David Eastman from Wasilla, Alaska. He came close with this hateful and idiotic remark: It’s beneficial for society when children who are victims of abuse die because “there aren’t needs for government services and whatnot over the whole course of that child’s life.”

No surprise, he’s a former Oath Keeper who attended the January 6 riot. Imagine outdoing Sarah Palin as a wingnut from Wasilla.

Then there’s washed-up actor and far-right curmudgeon Ben Stein. He informed us this week that he misses the day when a “a large African American woman” was on his pancake syrup bottle. 

It’s too bad the absence of a racist image impedes Stein’s enjoyment of his breakfast. What a snowflake.

But Stein’s idiocy was not enough to earn him this week’s crown. Instead, we turn to Rep. Bryon Donalds (R-Fla.). He proclaimed that “one of the reasons that Joe Biden, in my opinion, is pushing for solar panels and electric batteries and electric vehicles so hard is because his son facilitated the sale of a cobalt mine to a Chinese company. Cobalt is critical in the creation of electric batteries for electric vehicles, a critical element for solar panels.”

Wow.

To be clear, this is bonkers. Hunter Biden was indeed on the board of an investment firm that helped a Chinese firm acquire a major cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But that was in 2016. And, according to the New York Times, Biden left that firm in April 2020, and a board member of the firm told the newspaper that Biden and the other American founders of the company “were not involved in the mine deal and that the firm earned only a nominal fee from it,” with most of the money from the deal going into the firm’s operating funds. It seems rather unlikely Biden would be pushing to address this existential crisis called climate change for the sole reason that his son was involved with a firm that seven years ago was involved in a venture involving a cobalt mine. How blinded are the Republicans by their bottomless desire for conspiracy theories? And Donalds is a guy who got votes—albeit just a few—for House speaker?

Thus, the winner this week is——Damn, hold on. Just as I was typing that sentence, the judges noticed this comment from right-wing loon Scott Adams, also known as the cartoonist who created Dilbert. In a video, he says Black Americans are a “hate group” and that he “doesn’t want have anything to do” with them. And he offers advice to white people: “Get the hell away from Black people….It makes no sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore.”

This was no off-the-cuff racist comment, as many racist comments are. This was a highly intentional racist comment. But this wasn’t enough for Adams. He continues: “I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off….It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white….You just need to get away from them. Just get as much distance as you can.”

The astounded judges agree that in a week overflowing with stupidity, Adams took the cake and smashed it all over his face. Such open racism may well be a product of the Trump era, during which a racist president created a permission structure for depravity. But this award comes with an asterisk: Adams is deliberately championing racism to provoke; he is not speaking from ignorance. 

The Mailbag

As we might expect, there were lots of emails about my recent piece noting that the new eye-popping evidence in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News totally discredits the faux news network from top to bottom.

Rebecca McNamara wrote:

Why haven't we heard anything from the FCC since the revelations that the Fox newscasters did not believe in what they were saying?

And Judith Davidson expressed a similar sentiment:

I thought broadcast licenses were granted only when an entity could prove it proved a public service or good. Are there any laws remaining at all in this country? 

There is no government agency that polices the content of purported cable news outfits. As the Federal Communications Commission tells us, “Over-the-air broadcasts by local TV and radio stations are subject to certain speech restraints, but speech transmitted by cable or satellite TV systems generally is not. The FCC does not regulate online content.”

Thom Linden wants to change this:

In my view, Fox turned into a co-conspirator in the insurrection. It is time for the media to actively call for revamping the regulations. The FCC has been neutralized. There are no ethics requirements. There are no “public responsibilities.” We have literally reached the bottom of the corruption barrel. I know the MSM will cry about “free speech,” but that is an argument which only gets us deeper into the fascist (Bannon) plan for overthrow. So, wake up! Call for legislative reform. There is no freedom without proper guardrails over abuse. The press in the day of new tech bullhorns is no exception. I have been in tech my entire career—some in AI.  If you think the current situation is bad, just wait for AI and virtual reality to wade into this disinformation swamp. 

I understand the desire to find a way to thwart disinformation and propaganda that subverts American democracy. I just don’t quite know how you do that effectively without infringing on First Amendment rights and affording the government the power to restrain legitimate speech. The long-defunct Fairness Doctrine was a good stab at that. But it only applied to broadcast television and radio companies. Certainly, AI and deep fakes will make the disinformation problem worse. Please send in your ideas.

After reading the recent issue about Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis tussling over who’s a groomer, several readers recalled previous reporting about Trump and beauty pageant contests. As Jim Thompson put it:

There is a good story by Tessa Stuart in Rolling Stone (October 12, 2016) detailing Donald Trump’s creepiness around women. Of interest is her coverage of Trump buying Miss Universe and its subsidiaries Miss USA and Miss Teen USA. Trump was known to walk into dressing rooms and ogling young women in various states of undress. He later bragged about it on a Howard Stern show. And now he wants to taunt Ron DeSantis about grooming young girls?

Mariah Meriam wrote:

I have long admired your work, Mr. Corn, so do know that. As I have appreciated exploring Our Land. Yet I believe I shall not subscribe simply because, boy, is all this a tad overwhelming or what? The headlines scream, the inbox bulges, issues of the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Foreign Policy arrive regularly; podcasts and newsletters besiege.  It's truly getting increasingly hard to breathe, the more so as I am 76, the years veritably racing by such that day after tomorrow I shall be dead and for a very, very long time. As interesting as politics and foreign affairs have long been, bottom line, I am impotent. Do I wish to continue to enmesh in human stupidity or explore genius, the cosmos, Mother Nature? Methinks I know.

Mariah, I’m not going to argue with that. I wish you well in your explorations.

Several readers reported they, like me, had strong reactions when they watched The Banshees of Inisherin. Leonard Wolf wrote:

Thank you for your review. I too was suckered into thinking BOI would be another in the tradition of quirky Irish comedies and absolutely hated its negativity. Why has Hollywood gone so negative? Babylon and so many movies I've seen in recent years just leave me depressed.

Erik Skamser emailed:

I’ve been a fan of your reporting for a long time, and I do love your newsletter. I wish I’d read your review of  The Banshees of Inisherin sooner, though. You were right on. It is of course an Oscar-nominated movie, and I wanted to see as many of these as I could before Oscar night. The first minutes were compelling and there was quite a bit of humor. The acting, as you said, was terrific. But it soon enough got so dark that I regret watching it. I’ve warned several people about it; when they asked me what it’s about, they stopped me before I could finish describing the plot, which of course you were good not to get into. Bottom line, people: Pass on this one.

Karen Martin observed:

I totally loved Local Hero. I watched it again last month. I will date myself now by admitting I have a VCR tape of the movie. As for Banshees of Inisherin, it did take a very dark turn. As my maternal grandparents were born in the north of Ireland, I have felt a unique connection to the island. Maybe "dark" is in our DNA. Watch Belfast. Touching and fascinating and sad.

Alison Rose emailed:

Just had to say thank you for this edition. My father passed away last Wednesday, and this little exchange with Moxie is the first time I've smiled since. Much appreciated, both of you. Give that girl an extra treat for me, please.

I am sorry for your loss, Alison. And Moxie enjoyed that treat. Speaking of which….

MoxieCam™

“Why is that dog not paying attention to me?”

“Moxie, that’s not a dog. That’s a representation of a dog.”

“That’s no excuse.”

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

February 22, 2023: The corruption of Fox News—worse than you thought; the GOP’s very long war on Social Security; The Banshees of Inisherin is no laughing matter; and more.

February 18, 2022: Trump vs. DeSantis, Round 1: who’s a groomer?; a Chinese balloon and Chinese history; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Nikki Haley); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 14, 2023: The Trump-Russia denialists still can’t handle the truth; American Psychosis: an update; Joe Henry’s stunning new album; and more.

February 11, 2023: Joe Biden’s Americans First agenda; an arrested FBI agent and a mysterious Albania lobbying campaign; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Ben Shaprio); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 7, 2023: Justice for Warren Zevon; remembering the Myanmar coup; the great love story in HBO’s The Last of Us; and more.

February 4, 2023: How we got the Santos story and what comes next; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Rob Portman); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

January 31, 2023: The bull of John Durham; George Santos: it never stops; nominating Navalny; Judith Owen’s brassy Come On & Get It; and more.

January 28, 2023: Remembering Victor Navasky, the unflappable ringmaster of the Nation; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Julie Kelly); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

January 24, 2023: Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, the JFK assassination, Watergate, and the MAGA perversion of history; the right-wing disinformation machine and Hunter Biden; David Crosby, RIP; and more.

January 21, 2023: Is it getting harder to enjoy action thrillers?; Santos and a big-money con; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Donald Trump Jr.); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

January 18, 2023: Trump Derangement Syndrome on the right; nominating Navalny; the weirdness and ghostliness of Tar; and more.

January 14, 2023: Why Ron DeSantis shouldn’t—or won’t—run for president; the many faces of the George Santos scandal; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Ryan Zinke); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.