For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn’t the point, it’s merely the tactic. The main purpose of the culture war isn’t immiserating marginalized people – that’s its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they’ll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:

Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. It’s called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: “If they hate it, we love it”: Remember James Comey votive candles?Īnthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America’s spy agencies – excuse me, “the intelligence community” – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover’s FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:īut millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this “intelligence community” temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. The article features direct – and alarming – quotes, like supervisor Andrew Letcher, boss of the maintenance crews at Union Pacific’s Kansas City yard saying, “If I was an inspector on a train I would probably let some of that nitpicky shit go.” It got so alarming that some staffers started carrying hidden digital recorders, so they could capture audio of their bosses illegally ordering them to greenlight railcars that were too unsafe for use.

As private equity firms consolidated rail into an ever-dwindling number of companies, these workers face supervisors who are increasingly hostile to these bad orders. The reporting is centered on railyard maintenance inspectors, who are charged with writing up “bad orders” to prevent unsafe railcars from shipping out. It’s a tale of depraved indifference to public safety, backstopped by worker intimidation. These unsafe practices – and the corporate policies that deliberately gave rise to them – are documented in terrifying, eye-watering detail in a deeply reported Propublica story by Topher Sanders, Jessica Lussenhop,Dan Schwartz, Danelle Morton and Gabriel L Sandoval: This is just one of many terrifying near-misses that are increasingly common in America’s hyper-concentrated, private equity-dominated rail sector, where unsafe practices dominate and whistleblowers face brutal retaliation for coming forward to regulators. The “bomb train” neither crashed nor derailed, which meant that Grenada Railroad/Gulf & Atantic didn’t have to report it. Almost no one knows this, but last June, a 90-car train got away from its crew in Hernando, MS, rolling three miles through two public crossings, a ghost train that included 47 potentially explosive propane cars.

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