Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was asked about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene attack that he’s “emasculating the way we drive” by promoting electric vehicles.
Buttigieg appeared on Fox News’ Your World show yesterday. After discussing recovery from Hurricane Ian, including the right-wing attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, host Neil Cavuto brought up the subject of electric vehicles. He “asked,” “It did make some folks think, boy, these electric vehicles that are being pushed – between what happened in Florida and the grid that was compromised to the point where California Governor Newsom wanted people to cool it for a while on when and how often they charged their EVs. Do you think this reminds folks that we’re not ready or the EV’s are not ready for prime time?”
Buttigieg was unruffled and self-possessed, as always when he's on Fox. He pointed out that electric pickup trucks have power that can flow both ways so that in an extreme event like a hurricane, “they can actually work, basically, like a generator except that you don’t have to have a diesel ready for them.”
Cavuto interrupted to note that some states, i.e. California and New York, want to convert to electric vehicles by 2035. “Do you think we’ll be ready to do that?” he asked.
Buttigieg replied, “GM said they’re not even going to be making anything but electric vehicles after 2035.” He added, “This is America, of course we can do something like that.”
Next, Cavuto quoted Taylor Greene’s trollish and homophobic attack on Buttigieg, that he is “trying to emasculate the way we drive” by supporting environmentally friendly transportation.
Buttigieg had a great answer for that: “My sense of manhood is not connected to whether my vehicle is fueled by gasoline or whether it’s fueled by electricity. This is a practical matter.”
You can watch it below, from the October 4, 2022 Your World.
I’d hoped that we were past the days when gender identity was firmly certain types of machine. That sort of view should have disappeared with the early days of washing machine ads featuring only women with perfectly coiffed hair and willowy figures. The ads in Italy nowadays feature mostly dad doing the washing.