Lauren Boebert calls Pete Buttigieg a diversity “sympathy hire”

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) attacked gay Secretary of Transportation a diversity hire because he has not stopped all transportation accidents from occurring.

“Another train derailment – now in Minnesota. And it was carrying ethanol!” she wrote. “When we had a real Transportation Secretary instead of a DEI sympathy hire, this didn’t happen every day!” “DEI” is short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Related:

Lauren Boebert asks Pete Buttigieg for $33 million after insulting him repeatedly

She didn’t hesitate to launch homophobic attacks on the out Transportation Secretary and his husband, but now that she wants some of that cash for her district, she’s trying to play nice.

Another train derailment – now in Minnesota. And it was carrying ethanol!

When we had a real Transportation Secretary instead of a DEI sympathy hire, this didn’t happen every day!

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) March 30, 2023

She was referring to a train derailment in Raymond, Minnesota yesterday. Several of the cars carrying denatured ethanol – used as a fuel additive – ruptured and caught fire.

Homes within a half-mile of the derailment were evacuated for around 12 hours. No one was injured and the sheriff’s department said that there was no impact on the groundwater.

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Derailments like that are fairly common in the U.S., with around a thousand occurring each year. Most of them are not large-scale disasters.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – which Buttigieg was one of the main proponents of and Boebert called “wasteful” and “garbage” – contained funds for railroad improvement projects.

Boebert has had it out for Buttigieg for years. In 2021, Boebert proudly proclaimed that she gave birth in a truck in order to insult Buttigieg for taking “maternity leave” to “figure out how to chest feed” his two children. She said he wasn’t doing his job and accused him of making an “R-rated” movie with Jeff Bezos instead.

Just this year, she made fun of him for wearing safety equipment at a disaster site.

Many on the right have said that they believe Buttigieg was hired only because he’s gay, even though he is the only out LGBTQ+ Cabinet secretary in the history of the U.S.

This comes several years after some liberals in straight media claimed that Buttigieg isn’t gay enough. Slate ran a column with the headline “Is Pete Buttigieg just another white male candidate, or does his gayness count as diversity?” in 2019 that pondered if he ever faced “setbacks or barriers to success because he’s gay.” And the LA Review of Books accused him and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, of “Heterosexuality without women” because the couple didn’t have sex on the cover of Time magazine.