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January 17, 2022

That scene at the Union Pacific rail depot is all about wokesterism, not the weird things the press is cooking up

By Monica Showalter

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Sometimes, it's worth a million or more views.

This brings us to the pictures rolling out from Los Angeles of the wholesale theft of Union Pacific's railroad containers, leaving thousands of broken packages strewn around tracks in photos redolent of places like Calcutta, India.

That's wokesterism in action.  What it's not is all the idiotic things the press has been trying to blame for it, and I'm looking at you, Los Angeles Times.

Union Pacific is ready to throw in the towel on Los Angeles because these thefts are out of control — something like one out of six containers now gets broken into — and very few thieves are ever prosecuted.

Wokesterism is the problem.  What's the proof?  Well, the word of Union Pacific in its plea to far-left Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon is at least a clue.

That pretty well lays it out. But don't imagine that the press has caught on.   The Los Angeles Times, whose headquarters is walking distance from the track mess, meaning it missed the big story that CBS got that was literally right in front of its reporters' eyes for weeks now, has gone on to claim that the problem is vague e-commerce and geography, with a dollop of blaming the victim.  They carefully didn't mention that the district attorney doesn't prosecute looters.

Here's the nut graf of their execrable reportage, if you can call it that:

Thieves are pilfering railroad cars in a crime that harks back to the days of horseback-riding bandits, but is fueled by a host of modern realities, including the rise of e-commerce and Southern California's role as a hub for the movement of goods.

So we didn't have e-commerce, and Southern California was never a hub of trade (memo to LAT: Look at the diagonal street grids of the area and Google why they were built that way) until the last year or two when this shambles started happening?

This wouldn't pass a sixth-grade term paper as far as logic goes.  And like the packages on the nearby tracks, the answer is right in front of their faces.

Los Angeles has a wokester district attorney who refuses to prosecute crimes.  That's what's happening, but like the track shambles itself, they didn't notice.  And it's a really big story now, making national headlines, given that most Americans had no idea that their country had gone this far down into becoming a third-world hellhole.

The practical problems are obvious, too.  Rail shipments are a linchpin of the supply chain, and these thefts are not only keeping store shelves empty but are also raising prices, as the cost of theft is always passed on to the consumer.

The Times might have gotten a clue from Union Pacific, which wrote this letter to Gascon about the mass lootings of their freight trains:

The land-based pirates, operating in rings, break into the boxcars and shipping containers because they have no fear of prosecution.  Store shelves go empty, COVID test kits get strewn on the tracks and out of pharmacies, and missing package claims are filed to the tune of billions with the postal service and retailers.  It's a wholesale merger of the supply chain crisis and the Soros crime crisis right there in Los Angeles.  And man, it's ugly.

They could have had that story, but they had a "narrative," so their story got flabby.  Then they blamed the victim.

Union Pacific is charged with guarding the rail areas and has just private security guards to keep the thieves away.  Cops don't enforce that area.  The Los Angeles Times couched all of the complaints coming from Union Pacific about the extent of theft as something the company "claimed" to start — suggesting that maybe the company was exaggerating or lying.  The LAT then goes one worse, blaming Union Pacific for the mess by claiming itself that the railroad doesn't hire enough security guards:

Union Pacific is deploying more drones, has brought in extra security and enlisted the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to combat the thefts, Guerrero said.

But Union Pacific is partly to blame for not deploying more security, said Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck Division.

"We have millions of dollars of items and equipment, but it is unpoliced," Hurtado said. "There are even sometimes weapons on these trains. Everything goes by train, you learn."

The rail line didn't need large numbers of guards in the past, nor do they need brigades of guards when they pull into other stations in other cities...but that little issue escaped the LAT.

Next, the Times got out the gaslights, claiming that the crime isn't happening at all and it's all in our heads:

Though Los Angeles has seen a significant increase in homicides over the last two years, property crimes like the rail thefts are a different story. According to LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime was up 2.6% over the same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019.

That stat is literally irrelevant.  It doesn't describe what's happening at the Union Pacific depot.  It also barely notes that crimes are being not reported.  When the Union Pacific guards pick up a looter, the far-left district attorney of Los Angeles doesn't bother to prosecute.  Why go through the bother of reporting a crime if the district attorney is just going to fail to prosecute?  The Times included a crummy statement that should have been a "claim" from the D.A.'s office that the crimes they don't prosecute simply don't have enough evidence.  That's the Chesa Boudin line up in San Francisco, too.  It's like they read from the same talking points.

Win-win for the looter.  Win-win for the Soros left.  Not surprisingly, the shambles that have followed very likely led to the train derailment in Los Angeles just the other day.  That much crap on the tracks has to eventually contain something hard enough or massive enough to damage tracks or derail by itself a slow-moving freight train getting into or out of the station, so the shambles are getting harder to defend.

Wokesterism is causing these problems, and the minute Los Angeles gets a district attorney willing to prosecute crimes to protect America's supply chain, the thieves will be gone — and in the best scenario, locked up.  The press bid to cover up for the pirates and looters and explain away the shambles makes one wonder who these people are working for.  Wokesterism, and only wokesterism, is behind this lunacy.

Correction: Thefts are from containers, not boxcars.

Image: John Schreiber, Twitter video screen shot.

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