In theory, the federal government is the people’s servant: Our money pays for it, and our votes populate the political seats. In return, we expect the government to perform basic functions, among which are safe, reliable transportation and disaster assistance. In fact, the federal government, although happy to use its police and judicial power to take our money and willing to engage in the pretense of free and fair elections, has disengaged entirely from the American people. Nothing shows that more clearly than the Biden administration’s disinterest in the sufferings of the people in East Palestine, Ohio, where a train derailment and possibly inept post-derailment management has turned it into America’s Bhopal.

Admittedly, that introductory paragraph packs in a surprisingly large number of concepts, so let me unpack them.

On February 3, a train carrying dangerous chemicals, including vinyl chloride, derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. The cars carrying toxins began to leak so, allegedly to get the trains back on schedule, someone came up with the bright idea that cleanup would go more quickly if the leaking chemicals were burned.

That burn caused a giant plume of Phosgene, the WWI gas that killed 85,000 troops, to descend on East Palestine. Local animals (mammals, birds, and fish) died in droves, while residents began to show symptoms of having been gassed. Other chemicals were found to have spilled, and they joined the vinyl chloride in the Ohio River, which flows all the way down to Kentucky. All the chemicals are carcinogens.

Image: The derailed train cars. Public domain.

What we are witnessing is the worst chemical disaster in America in my lifetime. Thankfully, it hasn’t reached Bhopal, India, proportions (3,700-16,000 deaths and 558,125 injuries), but it is a crisis. People have been exposed to manifestly hazardous chemicals, and their homes and workplaces are now toxic waste zones.

Given the animal deaths and spreading, lingering environmental hazards, this is something that should have Democrats across America utterly outraged. One would think that the environmental branch of the Democrat party would be out in force but, so far, they’ve been inert. Cynical people (among whom I count myself) suspect that the problem is that East Palestine is almost entirely white and, even more criminally (in Democrat eyes), occupies a county that gave over 71% of its votes to Donald Trump in 2020.

Were our federal government functioning as intended, neither the race nor the politics of East Palestine residents would matter. The government would be there for them because this is precisely what our government is intended to do. However, we have an increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt government that uses race, LGBTQ status, and political loyalty as the metric by which it doles out the American money under its control.

That’s why Pete Buttigieg, the gay man who was rewarded for his sexual status with the position of transportation secretary, ignored the train derailment for so many days. When he finally spoke up yesterday, he was blasé: “'While this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing.”

Ah, about those train derailments. One of the unheralded beneficiaries of Biden’s decision to do away with the Keystone XL pipeline and generally to put the kibosh on pipelines was the train industry. People noted that, with the pipeline gone, all the oil that flowed safely and affordably through pipelines would be rerouted to trains.

Warren Buffett’s name got bandied about (apparently wrongly because he had nothing to do with Biden or the executive order), but the real point was that trains, with all their inconveniences and hazards, were back in the oil and toxic chemicals business. More trains on tracks that our transportation secretary has no interest in (because they don’t involve racial issues) inevitably means more derailments, which means more chemical spills, fires, and damaged communities.

But back to the disinterested Biden government. Everything I wrote above leads to the fact that it was inevitable that the Biden administration would refuse federal disaster funds to East Palestine residents:

President Joe Biden’s administration rejected a request for federal disaster assistance from Ohio Governor Mike DeWine in response to the train derailment in East Palestine earlier this month.

[snip]

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told Ohio that the Biden administration was rejecting its request for federal assistance because the agency said the incident did not qualify.

This is a lesson for all of us who are neither members of a politicized victim class nor illegal aliens. We ordinary, hard-working, tax-paying, voting American citizens are the most despised people in America.