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November 12, 2021

WaPo Fact-Checker Reverses on Buttigieg’s Racist Road Claim

Well, on second thought, he says, there’s more to the story.

Politicians love to boil down their political agendas to basic black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. It’s how they attempt to get people to emotionally buy in to their position. Furthermore, nuance doesn’t exist to a politician with an agenda because it doesn’t sell.

So, it was little surprise when a Washington Post “fact-checker” came to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg regarding his claim that roads and bridges were racist. Earlier this week, Buttigieg had referenced a story regarding famed New York City urban planner Robert Moses and the supposedly racist rationale behind the design of his roadways. The context of Buttigieg’s statement was in reference to the recently passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that contains a multibillion-dollar allocation of funding that for all intents and purposes amounts to a slush fund for the Biden administration to spend on its own special interest agenda. Buttigieg’s dubious claim of racist roads and bridges was aimed at defending this slush fund, all under the guise of fixing America’s “socially unjust” and “inequitable” infrastructure.

As we noted at the time, Buttigieg engaged in a Nikole Hannah-Jones-esk revision of history. Everything from America’s past is reimagined through the Marxist lens of Critical Race Theory so as to ensure that the inherent and underlying motive behind every action or decision was racist, even the building of roads and bridges.

Now, Buttigieg might have had a leg to stand on if his story was true, which was the instinctive position that Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler assumed when he quickly sided with Buttigieg’s claims. However, after receiving immediate blowback, Kessler began to walk back his “fact-check.”

Kessler writes: “When Buttigieg made these comments at the White House, some right-leaning Twitter users immediately cried foul. Well, our knee jerked. This was obviously a reference to one of the most famous anecdotes in Robert Caro’s majestic biography of Robert Moses, ‘The Power Broker.’ … But then we heard from Peter Shulman, an associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University. He said that this story has been largely debunked.”

Whether or not Moses may have held racist views — or even whether certain highways have gone through minority parts of town instead of white neighborhoods — is not the real issue. The real issue is the Biden administration’s motives today. It’s not about “doing justice” but rather about putting up a smoke screen to justify the furtherance of its own leftist political agenda at the expense of the American taxpayer. And that’s the great irony here: Buttigieg is pointing to supposed instances of past classism and discrimination in order to justify the leftist political agenda that promotes present classism and discrimination.

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