The far-right is speaking out about violence on transportation — and weaponizing it for their agenda.
Earlier this week, the far-right social media juggernaut Libs of TikTok expressed outrage that the "legacy media" had failed to cover the death of an e-biker who was struck and killed by an alleged drunk driver.
Of course, the post wasn't exactly demanding justice for people on two wheels. Dubbed an "extremist hate-peddler" by the Human Rights campaign, Libs of TikTok has never mentioned anything close to the Vision Zero movement before this post — and they almost certainly didn't intend to, here.
The account did not even bother to name the victim — 38-year-old Kjersten Strang — or offer any humanizing details about the single mom from St. Petersburg, Fla. who lost her life earlier this month. It didn't consider any of the structural factors that contributed to the horrific tragedy, either, like the five-lane, 35-mile per-hour road with no protected bike lane on which Strang rode.
What the post did highlight prominently, though, was the fact that Strang was white, and her alleged killer, Xavier Omar Rigby, 22, was Black — a fact which countless racist commenters seized on as proof that news outlets are concealing an epidemic of similar crimes. (Editor's note: Right-wing Islamaphobe Laura Loomer weighed in after Wednesday's horrific crash in New York City involving a white German tourist killed by a reckless driver who has an Arabic surname, though her tweet on the subject included errors and unconfirmed information, and, naturally, nothing about road safety.)
The racist myth of a "Black-on-white" crime wave — and, to be clear, it is 100 percent a myth — is hardly a new phenomenon. But in recent weeks, it seems like more and more far right voices are insinuating that non-existent crime wave is overwhelming our transportation spaces — and are weaponizing that myth to call for authoritarian policies that could make our whole country more violent.
Of course, it's not just social media accounts like Libs of TikTok making those insinuations. Federal Transpiration Secretary Sean Duffy has been complaining about America's "dirty" and "crime ridden" public transit systems since taking office, despite fierce pushback from riders and the politicians who represent them.
But after the Aug. 22 murder of Ukrainian refugee Irina Zarutska on a Charlotte, N.C. train, the Secretary's rhetoric took a disturbing turn. On the Fox News show "Hannity," Duffy openly contemplated "pulling [federal transit] money back" from agencies across the country so "the American taxpayer" doesn't have to "pay for the homelessness and criminal element." (Fox News showed footage of the crime, in which alleged killer DeCarlos Brown, Jr., who is Black and reportedly unhoused, stabbed Zarutska in the neck; Duffy disturbingly referred to Zarurtska as a "23-year-old little girl.")
At a Congressional roundtable the next month, Representative Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) pledged to "move fast to crack down on crime, secure our transit systems, and restore law and order so American families can travel without fear."
McClain stopped short of saying what that "crack down" might look like, but some might argue it's already happening. The Trump administration has already deployed the National Guard onto the streets of Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and most recently, Memphis, to fight a national crime surge that experts say doesn't exist — and many of the arrests the military are making are happening on trains, buses, and public roads.
For generations, street safety and mobility justice advocates have debated law enforcement's role in making streets, buses, and trains safer — even if few would debate that real dangers exist on all three.
Cyclists like Kjersten Strang are being killed by drivers at alarming rates; in 2024, we set a national record of 1,166 lives lost on bikes in just one year. All credible experts broadly agree, though, that those numbers are the result of systemic forces rather than the actions of individual road users alone — and that Black cyclists are statistically most likely to be the victims of that crisis. Though you probably won't see that mentioned on Libs of TikTok anytime soon.
Violence on transit, meanwhile, is also a real problem — even if many right-wingers are vastly overstating its scale in order to push their agenda.
Annual homicides on transit have risen since the pandemic — from 18 in 2019 to 46 in 2024, across the entire country. But while none of those deaths are acceptable, neither are deaths in car crashes, which claimed the lives of 39,345 people in 2024 alone.
Given those astonishing numbers, it's fair to ask: why isn't Sean Duffy threatening to withdraw federal funding from state highway agencies and departments of transportation until they bring car crash deaths down?
Why aren't more taxpayers outraged that they have to "pay for ... the criminal element" when their state DOTs pour $154 billion every single year largely into building the type of wide, fast roads that make it so easy for people to commit deadly roadway crimes like speeding that hundreds of millions of people do it virtually every time they get behind the wheel?
And where are the breathless congressional roundtables where politicians vow to "crack down" on transportation officials for their role in perpetuating a deadly roadway system, where some of the most shocking and violent deaths imaginable happen roughly once every 13 minutes?
Of course, we should hold everyone who creates our transportation systems accountable for their role in failing to stop all this violence — though not by vindictively defunding them en masse, as Secretary Duffy suggests.
When it comes to highways, for instance, we could require state DOTs to set targets to reduce deaths and injuries on their roads — fun fact: they're not required to do that! — and require them to redirect more federal money towards proven, common-sense street safety infrastructure like protected bike lanes and traffic calming if they miss those targets.
And to be clear, America's roadway crisis can't be laid solely at the feet of highway agencies. Automakers, for instance, also need to be held accountable for designing massive cars that are increasingly likely to kill a pedestrian or cyclist on impact, and regulated to prevent them from selling those dangerous models. The health-care system, meanwhile, needs to be held accountable for closing hospitals in rural areas, too, and reformed to give every U.S. resident a chance to access immediate post-crash care.
And drivers themselves need to be held accountable for the harm they cause in the context of those powerful structural forces — even as it's also critical to stop the violence inflicted by police in the name of that accountability, particularly in the Black and brown communities which are its disproportionate recipients.
Transit agencies, meanwhile, must do everything in their power to stop on-board violence — starting by maximizing their ridership, which can itself be a deterrent to violent crime. But doing that will require more money — not less — to increase service to tempt people out of cars, install infrastructure to protect bus and train drivers (an increasing problem as social tensions rise) and hire social workers to help de-escalate violence of all kinds. (As Streeetsblog NYC recently reported, this kind of thing is expensive.)
One thing is for sure: accounts like Libs of TikTok and transportation leaders like Sean Duffy certainly won't make America's roads, buses and trains safer by perpetuating distorted, racist myths about why our transportation system is so deadly.
And if you think any of this is really about saving lives — rather than asserting authoritarian power, demonizing vulnerable communities, and promoting car use — we've got a bridge to sell you.
