I am quite happy to have you here. Thank you. So almost two years ago now, you might remember

that there was a horrible train derailment in Ohio, in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Ohio,

Pennsylvania border. This was a huge, big, long train, nearly two miles long, and roughly 50 cars

on that train derailed.

And many of the cars that derailed were tank cars carrying toxic chemicals.

Between the crash itself and the decision that was made to burn off the contents of some of those cars,

the result in East Palestine was just this huge, disgusting, really dangerous environmental

disaster. For the people who lived there or lived near there, there was so many levels of

danger. There was the immediate danger of the crash and the resultant conflagration. But then immediately, there's also these

very serious health concerns and contamination concerns about their air and their soil and their

water. And those concerns seem to stretch on infinitely. Now, for reasons, we'll call them reasons.

This was also a disaster that sparked a ton of conspiracy theories and misinformation, particularly on the far right.

People like the pro-Trump far-right congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Green.

Also, the eccentric NFL quarterback, Aaron Rogers,

spread conspiracy theories about what had really happened in East Palestine and who had really

caused it and tried to make it look like a disaster and what they didn't want you to know

and what they were trying to distract you from.

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio had just become the senator from Ohio one month before the derailment happened. And he did do some kind of normal senator work on the derailment issue with Democratic

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. It's kind of the only highlight of J.D. Vance's whole Senate career.

But he also kind of went down the rabbit hole on this.

He went to Capitol Hill and announced that the country didn't care about the East Palestine derailment

because the people in the East Palestine are white people,

...