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Pedro L. Gonzalez

Mar 2, 2023 • 37 tweets • 11 min read • Read on X

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I interviewed East Palestine locals, contacted a controversial firm that Norfolk Southern hired to conduct testing, and examined how corporate lobbying and politics connect to put American communities on a collision course with disaster. open.substack.com/pub/contra/p/t… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

I also created a timeline of the crash.

The train derailed on Feb. 3, but it broke down at least once on the night of Feb. 1. It was hauling 151 cars, measuring 9,300 feet long, and weighing 18,000 tons.

Employees familiar with the Feb. 1 incident said there were concerns about the train's massive size. They spoke to CBS News anonymously about the matter for fear of retaliation from Norfolk Southern. cbsnews.com/news/ohio-trai….

Two days after the breakdown, at 8:12 p.m. on Feb. 3, a camera at the Butech Bliss manufacturing facility in Salem, Ohio, captured sparks or flames flashing underneath the ill-fated train about 20 miles from where it would derail.

The National Transportation Safety Board said that the crew was not notified by an alarm about an axle issue until the train passed a sensor just east of East Palestine, not far from where it ultimately derailed. ntsb.gov/investigations…

Shortly after it passed through Salem, the train derailed in East Palestine, near a Marathon Fuel gas station and behind a home heating oil supplier. A couple of teenagers leaving a high school basketball game saw an explosion and called the police.

The cars that derailed carried hazardous chemicals, including vinyl chloride, a toxic and flammable chemical used to make polyvinyl chloride or PVC that is extremely carcinogenic. Five of the cars that derailed contained a combined 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride.

Mayor Trent Conaway was at the crash site within minutes. He said there were "some small explosions" at the scene. Emergency crews initially struggled because the trucks pumping water used by firefighters froze in the cold Ohio night. cbsnews.com/news/ohio-trai…

https://twitter.com/GovMikeDeWine/status/1622409784593993729?s=20

On Feb. 4, Conaway issued an emergency declaration. At first, the plan was to let the train burn and clear the site after Norfolk Southern deemed it safe. But by Sunday night on Feb. 5, Gov. Mike DeWine urged hundreds of people to evacuate immediately.

https://twitter.com/GovMikeDeWine/status/1622409784593993729?s=20

Then came the controlled burn on Feb. 6 when the chemical tanks threatened to explode.

Emergency crews dug trenches around the cars into which the vinyl chloride was poured and ignited with flares, unleashing a toxic mass that mushroomed toward the sky from the pits.

In a letter sent to DeWine on March 1, a union rep for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees said emergency workers weren't given proper protective equipment and suffered migraines and nausea for days after. What he wrote is damning if even half accurate.

"I am writing to share with you the level of disregard that Norfolk Southern has for the safety of the railroad’s Workers, its track structure, and East Palestine and other American communities where NS operates."
ntsb.gov/investigations…

There's also controversy over how contaminated soil was handled.

A local who works with soil told me: "There was no removal of the contaminated soil. The tanks were pushed to the side, tracks were put in, and trains were running the day the evacuation order was lifted."

Mayor Conaway said the same thing: as soon as the mandatory evacuation order was lifted on the night of Feb. 8, Norfolk Southern trains started rolling--before residents could reopen their shops or return home. Conaway was furious. trains.com/trn/news-revie…

The trains were rolling again but for people like Zsuzsa Gyenes, the trouble had only begun. She fled her home around 3 am with her son after the train derailed on the night of Feb. 3. I spoke with her outside an EPA press conference.

Zsuzsa told me they didn't know what happened that night. They just knew there was trouble because all the sirens in the air. And then she had difficulty breathing and her asthmatic son started vomiting as their house filled with an awful smell.

She has been staying in a hotel with her son since the wreck. But the housing assistance is coming to an end and she doesn't know if it's safe to go home, considering her son also has asthma.

But who determines if it's safe in this case? A contractor hired by Norfolk Southern.

Norfolk Southern hired a firm called the he Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH) to conduct testing in East Palestine. Zsuzsa has had a less than stellar experience with CTEH.

CTEH has been involved in several environmental incidents, including the BP oil spill, and has been criticized for always saying what corporations seem to want them to say: everything is fine, there is no reason to worry. archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…

Zsuzsa said a CTEH toxicologist told her they couldn't connect symptoms people are reporting to the train.

I contacted CTEH for a comment. They said: "We have not been made aware of symptoms in members of the community that are attributable to air quality in East Palestine."

CTEH: "Air monitoring data collected in the community indicates no short or long-term health risks concerning incident-related substances."

People in and near East Palestine continue to report everything from persistent headaches to rashes that they attribute to the derailment.

Zsuzsa's home was to be tested on Feb. 23. But when no one showed up, she called a Norfolk Southern rep to get some answers. According to Zsuzsa, this person said: "You need to talk to an attorney to be able to talk to anybody."

I tried to reach them for a comment but couldn't.

It's difficult for people to trust the authorities in charge of the cleanup for all the above reasons and more. It also doesn't help that Norfolk Southern spends a ton of money lobbying Democrats and Republicans. DeWine's own connections to the railroad company make locals itch.

For example, on Feb. 15, DeWine said in a press release that the "Ohio EPA is confident that the municipal water is safe to drink" after tests returned with "no detection of contaminants associated with the derailment." But those tests weren't done by state or local officials...

Instead, they were done by AECOM, a Dallas-based consulting firm hired by Norfolk Southern. DeWine received at least one contribution from AECOM last year. followthemoney.org/show-me?dt=1&d…

DeWine has also received thousands of dollars from Norfolk Southern. But so have many politicians. Here's a chart that shows Norfolk Southern's political giving over the years via the National Institute on Money in Politics.

Remember Troy Nehls criticizing JD Vance for telling people to avoid drinking tap water in East Palestine? Well... foxnews.com/politics/gop-r…

Nehls has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors in the transportation sector, according to Open Secrets. That includes railroad companies.

Nehls has also received donations from Norfolk Southern.

A report of the railroad company’s contributions to candidates and political committees shows it gave to Nehls directly during the 2022 general election.
nscorp.com/content/dam/ns…

But going back to DeWine: the governor has also been connected to Norfolk Southern through Dan McCarthy, who was DeWine's top lobbyist until he resigned amid a scandal in 2021.

In 2021, FirstEnergy agreed to pay a $230 million fine for bribing public officials in an effort to secure a $1 billion bailout for two nuclear plants in northern Ohio. cincinnati.com/story/news/pol…

FirstEnergy used a dark money group called Partners for Progress to that end, which it set up in 2017. At that time, McCarthy was president of Partners for Progress and a lobbyist for FirstEnergy.

According to his LinkedIn, McCarthy also led The Success Group, another lobbying firm, from 1994 to 2020, which overlapped with his tenure as DeWine's legislative director. governor.ohio.gov/media/news-and…

The Ohio Lobbying Activity Center database shows Norfolk Southern has employed the group to lobby on a wide array of railroad-related issues. www2.jlec-olig.state.oh.us/olac/Reports/F…

Norfolk Southern is the perfect villain in this story. Its top shareholders are Vanguard Group and BlackRock. But the truth is that incidents like these are the result of bipartisan neglect. nscorp.com/content/nscorp…

This thread is just a series of excerpts from the article. There is a lot more to the story that you can read here. contra.substack.com/p/the-poison-t…

And you can support my work by becoming a subscriber. contra.substack.com/subscribe

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More from @emeriticus

Pedro L. Gonzalez

@emeriticus

Jan 25

BREAKING Trump has issued a statement in support of the Republican governors defying the Biden administration on the border

Just kidding, he posted about E. Jean Carroll about a dozen times

It just keeps going

look at my GOP front runner dog it’s over

Read 5 tweets

Pedro L. Gonzalez

@emeriticus

Dec 30, 2023

Mike DeWine Is an Idiot

🧵

Today, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill designed to ban the crime against children called “gender-affirming care.” What DeWine presented as the well-thought-out reasoning behind his decision was a steaming pile of garbage.

DeWine claimed that, were he to support the bill, “Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is best for a child than the two people who know that child the best—the parents.”

“The Ohio way is to approach things in a systematic manner, to follow the evidence, to be careful, and that’s really what we’re doing,” DeWine added.

Where to begin?

Perhaps it's best to start by highlighting that there is little (to be charitable) to no (to be honest) solid evidence behind the long-term effectiveness of “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Two major investigations recently conducted by The New York Times and Reuters came to that conclusion, each in their own wending way. Moreover, the puberty blockers used in this obscene form of “care” are administered off-label—without approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The pharmaceutical companies that profit from this have no desire to even conduct clinical trials to establish their safety in this regard or attempt to understand the permanent consequences of blocking puberty at a critical developmental stage. Why should they bother? They have fools like DeWine who will gladly enable them to pump poison into the veins of your sons and daughters.

Read⤵️

Lupron Depot-Ped is the most commonly prescribed puberty blocker given to “transgender youth.” Here are some adverse events filed in the FDA’s reporting database in connection with the drug:

-Depression
-Suicidal ideation
-Emotional disorder
-Depressed mood
-Emotional distress
-Mental disorder
-Psychotic disorder
-Suicide attempt
-Growth retardation
-Antisocial behavior
-Psychotic symptom

⤵️

So when DeWine says he is following the evidence, he betrays his stupidity about the issue or assumes the average American is stupid or both. But they’re certainly smarter than he is on this.⤵️

Read 9 tweets

Pedro L. Gonzalez

@emeriticus

Dec 27, 2023

DeSantis' campaign has had problems. No doubt. But that's not the full picture. A key problem, one that had to be discovered the hard way, is that Trump has a patronage network that will not move to or support a different candidate.

For reasons that become obvious, this is a sacred cow few people on the right are prepared to poke, let alone slay.

Tucker Carlson's first post-Fox advertising deal was with a company in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor. Once that happened, the hope of impartiality was gone. It's the same deal with Human Events and Post Millennial. The Human Events Media Group acquisition of Post Millennial was led by Trump donor and booster Jeff Webb, so there was no chance those publications would swing behind or help a Trump rival.

Consider that when Daniel Penny's legal defense fundraiser blew up because DeSantis promoted it, Post Millennial did a story about it *without mentioning DeSantis* once. It was like Stalinists erasing a purged person from a photograph.

When I was still doing conservative media, I was told that Team Trump was monitoring programs for critics, using their influence to try to suppress them. There is just no scenario in which a network like this will select a candidate that is best for the movement rather than the network itself, even if the individuals involved were to want the latter.

The whole thing was described to me simply as: if you play ball, you get access; if you decide that Trump isn't the best way forward, you lose access (and worse, if you don't keep your mouth shut). If you're a personality, that means no more invitations to Mar-a-Lago for a movie screening or retweets from big accounts. But there was no way of knowing how any of this worked until someone challenged Trump, then the whole thing sprang into action and circled the wagons around him and himself.

The ramifications of all this will extend beyond the primary, regardless of the outcome. There will be permanent fractures and disillusionment. That's how I feel about national "right-wing" politics right now. But to understand why, you have to understand the networks.

Nothing against @AuronMacintyre btw, these are just my thoughts on the broader rw landscape

This is a double edge sword btw, because if you benefit from it, it's nice and it can help you do some good or get your message out in your space--but it will also work against you by justifying everything Trump does. Say you're a pro-Trump tough on crime person. Sorry--but if Trump wants to do the First Step Act, you're going to get the First Step Act shoved down your throat. And the harder you protest, the more it will hurt going down.

Read 5 tweets

Pedro L. Gonzalez

@emeriticus

Dec 11, 2023

New: While serving in the Trump administration, Brooke Rollins was, among other things, instrumental in the passage of the First Step Act that freed rapists and murderers from federal prison

She now runs Trump’s official think tank, making over $550K

🧵

Rollins was one of the advisers who told Trump that getting tough on Black Lives Matter/George Floyd rioters in 2020 would seem racist

He of course agreed with her

Now, Rollins runs Trump’s America First Policy Institute (AFPI), which will likely staff the next White House if he wins

It’s been called the “White House in waiting”

politico.com/news/2022/07/2…

Read 8 tweets

Pedro L. Gonzalez

@emeriticus

Nov 30, 2023

https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1730011191768977629

Vivek is responding to my reporting. He isn’t being honest. He didn’t just say something “stupid” on a podcast. He sent members of Congress a memo advocating against lifting lockdowns and for creating a national registry. A company he created pitched the idea to the FDA and worked with the federal government on it.

Here’s a timeline:

-February 2020: Datavant, a healthcare data company created by Vivek, recruits George W. Bush-Era FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach.

-March 2020: Datavant begins spearheading a registry of COVID-19 patients by pooling medical records from across the country (WSJ).

-April 3, 2020: Vivek says on the Rockefeller Client Insights podcast that he supports a system where people would be “segregated” under a national testing regime.

-April 8, 2020: Datavant is in touch with the FDA about a “proposed registry” that “would aim to include every patient who has been tested for COVID-19” (WSJ).

It was around this time that Vivek circulated the memo I obtained to members of Congress in which he argued against lifting lockdowns and for implementing universal testing to determine who could go back to life. He concluded by proposing a “public-private” partnership, which is what his company Datavant pitched to the federal government.

-November 2020: Vivek’s company announced that it was collaborating on gathering patient data with the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

Vivek didn’t just support lockdowns—he tried to profit from it while collaborating with the very “regime” he claims to oppose. Then he tried to bury it, like he tried to bury details about his background by paying a Wikipedia editor to sanitize his biography weeks before declaring his candidacy.

https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1730011191768977629

He and his team have to pretend this is about the podcast because what I actually wrote is far more damning. I knew they would. That’s why I wrote this at the end:

Nothing says TRUTH like hiring someone to erase inconvenient details about your biography right before you run for president.

Read 4 tweets

Pedro L. Gonzalez

@emeriticus

Nov 29, 2023

Exclusive: Vivek Ramaswamy Supported COVID Segregation

🧵

“Could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated?”

That sounds like an excerpt from a science fiction novel about a medical dystopia. But it’s a quote from Vivek Ramaswamy, the biopharma entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate.

In April 2020, as the U.S. went into lockdown, Ramaswamy said he would be open to that kind of system to determine who could “go back to normal life.” He described it as an “inequity,” but concluded that “everyone stands to benefit from it.” Ramaswamy made the comments during an episode of Rockefeller Client Insights, the podcast of Rockefeller Capital Management.

A concept like that is sharply at odds with the image of the civil libertarian he has cultivated during the primary. It also raises questions about his anti-establishment bona fides.

During the podcast, Ramaswamy talked about different aspects of the coronavirus outbreak with Gregory J. Fleming, the president and CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management. Fleming asked him what a “path to normalcy” might look like, given what he described as a “potentially extended timeline” for the rollout of vaccines and treatments. The country was then more than 15 days into “15 days to slow the spread.”

“One path to normalcy and a path that I’d like to see further progress made on is broad rollout of our antibody tests,” Ramaswamy said. He corrected himself and continued:

“It’s not our company; I’m saying, as a society, rolling out the antibody tests such that we actually get our arms around what portion of the population is already immune through exposures that they may not have even known that they had. It might be 10 percent, it might be 20 percent, we might discover that it is some higher number. Those people are gonna be able to get back to work pretty quickly, get back to normal life because effectively they have the immunity badge, they have a badge in the form of their antibodies that protect them best we know from reinfection.

On the flip side, you then have the people who don’t have immunity, and the question is those who are negative on the antibody tests, what happens with them? Now, this has been—I’ve had discussions in the last few days with policymakers, a couple of people in Congress, one U.S. Senator, and I think this is not lost on folks. But I think one early topic that’s come up is, could we tolerate a national system in which certain people on the basis of a biomarker are segregated? To say you can’t go back to normal life, where certain people get a head start. Is that an inequity we would tolerate? I personally think that it is better than the status quo if we can send 10 or 20 percent of the people back on the basis of having immunity that’s proven on the basis of a lab-based result that’s now available. That’s a good thing, and everyone stands to benefit from it.”

A draft for discussion obtained by Contra shows Ramaswamy pitched this strategy to policymakers.

“After its apex of COVID-19 cases, each state should start to administer universal antibody testing to determine which individuals have immunity to SARS-Cov-2 and which individuals do not,” he wrote. “Individuals with immunity can return to normal life, be released from social distancing practices, and help restart the economy.”

“States should also have a well-designed plan for who should be released from social distancing norms to help revive the economy in advance of the availability of a COVID-19 vaccine,” he added.

Read⤵️

In the discussion draft, he countered concern of societal “backlash against discriminating on the basis of antibody test results” by arguing that the alternative would be to “lift shelter-in-place and social distancing mandates on everyone which would increase the risk of new outbreaks.” ⤵️

He proposed a “public-private partnership” whose stakeholders could be a “division of government, a private company, or a nonprofit organization” that would maintain “the registry of individuals who are immune and individuals who should be prioritized for testing.” ⤵️

Read 12 tweets

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