Family Called Police on Biden Energy Secretary's EV Caravan - They Didn't Care There Was a Baby on Board
It was no doubt supposed to be a creampuff piece. It ended up being damning instead.
A reporter for the state-propaganda network of NPR rode along on a road trip with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to get a look at the future of electric vehicles on the American road system.
But amid the paeans to Granholm’s background and the serious look at the problems facing the liberal dream about the future American auto fleet, one incident stood out — not just for what it said about the limitations of electric vehicles, but for what it meant about the arrogance of power.
Irate family called police on Jennifer Granholm’s team for blocking charging station spot for her electric car https://t.co/cPZN7q2PYe #FoxNews
— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) September 11, 2023
It occurred in Grovestown, Georgia, about 170 miles from the Granholm starting point of Charlotte, North Carolina, according to NPR’s Camila Domonoske.
At that distance, drivers in most gas-powered vehicles might be thinking about making a pit stop for a snack or to take care of some biological needs, but assuming they started with a full tank, filling up wouldn’t be a necessity.
Clearly, the situation was different with Granholm’s caravan of electric vehicles (no doubt armor-plated to protect the indispensable secretary from the white supremacist domestic terrorists the Biden administration pretends are threatening the Republic).
As Domonoske reported, Grahnholm’s squad had planned to “fast-charge” in the suburb of Augusta, Georgia. And that’s where things went wrong.
Hilarious: Traitor Biden’s Energy Secretary’s Electric Vehicle Road Trip Turns Into an Entitlement Clown Show, Family Forced to Call Police – RedState https://t.co/WH4bGoojYh
— Brian K. Lutes (@scpatrolclt) September 11, 2023
“Her advance team realized there weren’t going to be enough plugs to go around. One of the station’s four chargers was broken, and others were occupied. So an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy.
“That did not go down well: a regular gas-powered car blocking the only free spot for a charger?”
It’s a good bet that “did not go down well” is an understatement. There aren’t many drivers who would be happy to see a gas-powered car blocking a perfectly good charging station for a vehicle that wasn’t even in sight yet.
(Picture yourself needing to fill up a tank while some yokel blocks the only available pump with a wheelbarrow because his boss is on the way.)
But throw in the fact that there was a family involved, and one with a baby on board in the heat of a Georgia summer, and things will get positively unpleasant.
“In fact,” Domonoske wrote, “a family that was boxed out — on a sweltering day, with a baby in the vehicle — was so upset they decided to get the authorities involved: They called the police.”
Now, the article is light on specifics — Domonoske doesn’t even say exactly when the trip took place beyond “this summer” — but it’s a fair assumption that calling the police wasn’t the fuming family’s first move.
Most normal people would ask the driver of the offending vehicle to move out of the way first. Most normal people would probably ask again, then try to reason with the obstructionist individual, and then go through five stages of fury before finally getting the law involved.
But just for the sake of argument, assume the family only asked once or twice to get access to the charger before dropping the dime. That, in all likelihood, means the staffer decided that it was more important to keep the charging station “reserved” with an internal-combustion powered vehicle for the Biden administration’s big energy boss than it was for a family (of presumably American citizens) to power up a vehicle with a baby inside.
Insert former President Donald Trump’s first energy secretary, Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and therefore doubly hated by the establishment media, and imagine how it would have been treated by the liberal media — very much including NPR. (This is the “news” outlet that decided in October 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop story would be a waste of time for both its staff and its loyal liberal followers. It didn’t improve much after that either.)
But this is Jennifer Granholm, a liberal with Marie Antoinette aloofness on a Potemkin tour of the Southeast, and her staff literally preventing a family from accessing a charging station to the point where the police were called.
Now, the interesting thing is that Granholm’s pompous staffers were doing nothing illegal, according to Domonoske, but it was all probably unnecessary in the first place.
“The sheriff’s office couldn’t do anything. It’s not illegal for a non-EV to claim a charging spot in Georgia,” she wrote. “Energy Department staff scrambled to smooth over the situation, including sending other vehicles to slower chargers, until both the frustrated family and the secretary had room to charge.”
Note that the denouement did not include any of the vehicles being finished charging — only that they’d been moved to “slower charges.” There’s no way of knowing for sure from the sketchy reporting (quite possibly deliberately sketchy), but that’s a pretty good sign that some sort of understanding could have been reached before John B. Law got involved.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm throws her name into the hat for the most unlikeable Biden Administration member by blocking a family with a baby from charging their car. https://t.co/sCUYDnFUIh
— MRCTV (@mrctv) September 11, 2023
The baby story wasn’t all that was in the report, of course. In fact, it was fairly buried with no real attempt to draw attention to it.
The piece featured a homage to Granholm that’s frankly embarrassing, even by NPR’s Pravda standards — “the perfect person to help pitch the United States’ ambitious shift to EVs.”
It has some surprisingly serious information about the kind of serious problems facing a conversion to electric vehicles that’s being driven by government diktat rather than consumer demand.
(The article includes a vignette of Granholm showing pictures to demonstrate how quickly the internal combustion engine took over American cities but neglects to mention that’s because Americans wanted the vehicles it powered, not because the government forced it.)
But for a picture of high-handed government at work, the story of the charger standoff is priceless:
An official of an unnecessary department, on an unnecessary road trip to promote an unwanted technology ends up infuriating a family to the point where someone actually calls the cops.
And in its way, it’s as damning as it gets.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
