FOX’s Laura Ingraham Says Buttigieg Plans To Use Public Transportation To Take Away Freedoms
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FOX News’ Laura Ingraham claimed tonight that Pete Buttigieg is planning to use the transportation bill to take away our freedoms by getting us on public transportation.
Last month, the Department of Transportation—led by Secretary Pete Buttigieg—unveiled the National Roadway Safety Strategy, an effort partly funded by President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure package to reduce traffic deaths. Naturally, Ingraham characterized this effort as a liberal “war on driving.”
The strategy notes that traffic deaths saw an 18.4 percent increase in the first half of 2021 compared to the first half of 2020. Ingraham claimed, because fewer people were on the roads in 2020 due to the pandemic, that of course there was a heavy increase in traffic deaths as COVID-19 shutdowns loosened around the country the next year.
But Ingraham’s assumption is wrong.
Though there were fewer people on the roads in 2020, that year saw the highest number of traffic deaths since 2007 and a 7.2 percent increase in traffic deaths from 2019, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) report from last summer.
But as is her wont, Ingraham absurdly claimed the effort to reduce traffic fatalities was an example of Democrats moving to limit personal freedoms through strategies like public transit incentives and emergency care service improvements.
Ingraham derided a quote from the NHTSA that urged Americans to reject “a culture that accepts as inevitable the loss of tens of thousands of people in traffic crashes,” saying:
“The culture he’s talking about doesn’t exist because I know no one who celebrates death on the roads. They’re always tragic. The real cultural shift the left wants to force on us involves our freedoms, doing away with freedom on the open roads. Our ability to go wherever we want, as far as we want, whenever we want.”
Note that the quote Ingraham read rejected the idea that there is an “acceptable” number of traffic deaths. It did not claim that people were celebrating traffic deaths, as Ingraham characterized it.
Two minutes later, Ingraham demonstrated the exact point the quote was making: that traffic deaths are treated as acceptable and inevitable, saying through laughter:
“Its stated goal is getting to zero traffic fatalities, which is just obviously absolutely ludicrous, just like zero COVID, that strategy was ludicrous.”
The strategy notes that getting to zero roadway fatalities is “ambitious” but that the number is “the only acceptable number of deaths on our highways, roads, and streets.”
Social media users didn’t yield to Ingraham’s road rage.
Yet more of the Murdoch-fueled toxins coursing through the airwaves. https://t.co/6wvGdTgEH7
— KELTIK WARRIOR /aka Vince T/ (@RevMillard) February 16, 2022
At least Fox News viewers can rest assured that, whether it’s from vaccine refusals or traffic crashes, Ingraham will always fight for their right to a dead end.
