By Stephen L. Miller
Last winter, when Texas experienced a power grid failure due to a winter storm, the person who took most of the brunt of the media ire was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who was vacationing with his family in Mexico. Few in the media stopped to ask what a U.S. senator has to do with a local state power grid.
Last month, when Jackson, Mississippi, experienced a flood that shut down the city’s largest water treatment plant, the media and political Left blamed a climate crisis, environmental racism, and the Republican governor. The real culprit, however, was the city’s catastrophically ill-maintained water plant. But national reporters had little interest in blaming the mayor of Jackson, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a Democrat and self-professed socialist who was elected in 2017. This matters because Democrats have controlled the city’s mayoral office going back to 1948.
This media blindness is again on display in California’s power crisis. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has been widely praised for championing a law banning gas-powered vehicles by 2035. But Newsom has suffered very little criticism on how the current failing power grid in his state is supposed to shoulder such an influx in electric car usage. Instead, Newsom has spent much of his energy as of late focusing on Florida and its governor. Again, the media like this.
Put simply, too many in the media are willing to lament infrastructure problems and issues like “environmental racism” right up until that discussion involves Democratic Party culpability. There is no actual solution to the vague concept of environmental racism, which is the entire point. It’s simply a specter that the media will continue to use to divide the country.
But there is a solution to replacing leaders in places like Jackson and Sacramento, where decades of single party-led mismanagement have wreaked and are wreaking havoc.