Media Sobbing Over Fired Bureaucrats Told Miners ‘Learn To Code’

I was at the last outpost of the Keystone XL pipeline when President Biden shut it down in January of 2021. The only TV outlet there covering the shutdown was Fox News. My organization, Power The Future, fights for energy workers, and Joe Biden had declared war against them.

Biden signed Executive Order 13990 just a few hours after his swearing in, and thousands of people were suddenly out of a job. I met Bugsy, a 30-year master welder, over the phone. Not only had he lost the current project on Keystone XL, but all future welding gigs had been scrapped. No one would build a pipeline in the era of Biden. Bugsy, a single dad of three Texas farm boys, went from having nearly a decade of jobs lined up to nothing.

His story needed to be told. I asked my buddy Alex Bruesewitz if he could get me a film crew and help me document what was happening. We went to Texas and interviewed dozens of people, and I sent raw footage of one of our videos to contacts at Fox News. The next day Bugsy was on with Dana Perino telling his own story to the nation.

I did not see Bugsy’s story on any of the networks. I did not see any of the 8,000 union workers on CNN or MSNBC. I didn’t read about their personal hardships at the hands of an unfeeling president in major newspapers. Such suffering would be a moving segment for a show like on “60 Minutes,” but Keystone workers were never featured.

“60 Minutes” did run a segment recently on 58 USAID managers who were fired by President Trump’s DOGE house cleaning. I called them out in what we can call a viral post on X. Trump firing 58 people is newsworthy. Biden firing 14,000 pipeline workers was not.

After Biden signed the executive order, it was the newly crowned Climate Czar John Kerry who justified the decision, saying the Keystone workers would now “have better choices” and could “go to work to make the solar panels.”

An op-ed in the Washington Post celebrating the climate actions saying “almost every Cabinet job is actually a climate job.” Nowhere did it mention John Kerry was “unelected,” but I guess those qualifiers only pertain to Elon Musk.

The US Conference of Mayors applauded Biden’s actions, with no mention of lost jobs. Stephen Schneck, executive director of Franciscan Action Network, commended Biden, even citing Pope Francis’ love of the green agenda, with no mention of lost jobs. Rev. Susan Hendershot, president of Interfaith Power & Light, praised the actions as “in line with our moral values of justice, peace, and love for our neighbors.” Again, no mention of lost jobs.

Contrast this with the DOGE firings of today, and the prospects for future employment nor the intentions of the president are quite so lauded.

CBS News recently ran the story of a park ranger who lost his dream job. “I am tired of waking up every morning at 2 a.m. wondering how I am going to provide for my family if I lose my job. I am tired of wiping away my wife’s tears …,” the former park ranger says, and I feel for him, no doubt. We all do. No one wants our fellow Americans to suffer.

But for the media, it seems only certain suffering is valuable suffering. Fired bureaucrats is a devastating story. Fired energy workers is an acceptable outcome because something-something climate change.

Flippancy towards climate change casualties is commonplace. In one of the most loathsome and stomach-turning remarks made by a sentient being, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a 2018 climate conference smiled gleefully as he talked about eliminating coal workers’ jobs.

“We can find other things for them to do” he says, without clarifying who the “we” is, nor what the “other things” are, nor if the workers can have any input. The climate hysteric Bloomberg is very clear: their jobs must go, an effortless statement for a man worth over $100 billion.

His eponymous media outlet could run a story about a coal miner who lost his “dream job” and who “wipes away his wife’s tears.” I have told that story many times, even seen it with my own eyes, but once again, less valuable suffering from a less attractive subject. No one cares about energy workers. Not when there’s a climate to save.

Rural America, from former coal towns near where I live in Appalachia to former steel towns in western Pennsylvania to former furniture towns in North Carolina, has suffered the bad policies pushed principally by misanthropic, globalist groups. They have plunged our fellow Americans into misery turning once great towns into depressed hellscapes. We talk sociologically about depression, alcoholism, domestic violence, and suicide, ignoring the real root causes of these symptoms of systemic poverty: the loss of the very rural job Bloomberg denigrates.

I am sorry for the job losses of federal government workers, despite many of them having implemented the policies that decimated rural America. I do not mock them when I say to them what many of them have said to displaced energy workers: drive for Uber. Start an OnlyFans page. Get a green job. Learn to code.

Energy jobs will return, and quickly. Perhaps our displaced federal government employees could move to rural America and learn a trade in the energy industry. The houses are cheap. There is no traffic. The people are friendly. And the media, unwilling to venture outside of the city, will leave you alone.

Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @DanielTurnerPTF.