As a special thank you to our dedicated members, we at The Western Journal have decided to start answering reader questions via a recurring series.
If you have any questions about the latest news regarding the Trump administration, fake news, woke culture — or just regarding Christian/conservative politics in general — please submit them using this form.
“Current Events – My question is in reference to the destruction of planes, helicopters, trains [as a] topic. So many are happening in such a short amount of time. I don’t think that they are random. I think that the enemies of the United States are behind every one of them.”
This, naturally, has been a very real concern among people, particularly with the high-profile 737 Max incidents — including the plane’s grounding — and the crashes of American Airlines Flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter, Jeju Air Flight 2216, and Delta Connection Flight 4819.
Then, of course, there are the high-profile train derailments, including the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment in 2023.
And, of course, social media has recently been inundated with videos of not just those incidents but of smaller craft crashing as well.
However, this is more of a phenomenon of attention than anything else, since aviation is safer than ever. Before the American Airlines collision just outside of Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C., the last crash with more than a handful of fatalities in the United States was 16 years ago, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 stalled while trying to land in Buffalo, New York, killing 50.
The crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in San Francisco in 2013 was somewhat more dramatic, but only led to three fatalities.
This record is pretty amazing when you consider that, in 1987 alone, six major commercial aviation crashes happened in the United States.
That’s not to say there aren’t concerns. Immediately after the Flight 5342 collision on Jan. 29, concerns about degrading standards in our air traffic control system — particularly due to DEI policies — came front and center.
Near-miss incidents — where aircraft almost collide — have been on the rise, with 503 in the fiscal year ending in September of 2023, according to The New York Times. Almost all air traffic control towers in the United States are understaffed, and fixing that — and the broken DEI initiatives that, in part, have led to the shortage — has been a priority of the new Trump administration.
As for train derailments, while there have been an average of 2,808 derailments per year between 1975 and 2023, those are also down sharply over time. In 1978, the peak year, some 9,400 derailments happened.
Compare that to 1,259 in 2022. In addition, most of these happen in rail yards — not the type you see in East Palestine, say.
Most of these accidents don’t just happen for one reason, either; human ingenuity has built numerous layers of redundancy into our systems, and when a flaw is identified it can be corrected — even if it’ll require a significant overhaul in how we hire, train, and staff air traffic control towers.
But, perhaps most importantly, we can’t forget the role social media plays in this. Of those 9,800 derailments that happened in 1978, how many of them did you see? Maybe one or two if the local news had footage. Now, anyone with a smartphone and an X account will have a crash video up in minutes.
If a plane declares an emergency, platforms like FlightAware give the exact location of the plane and its progress back to the airport — even if it’s just something minor like an unruly passenger or an engine problem.
To emphasize the point: In 1979, when American Airlines Flight 191 crashed on takeoff at Chicago O’Hare, what cemented the disaster in the public consciousness was this grainy photo taken just before the DC-10 fell to earth, a harrowing sight almost nobody had seen before:
10. American Airlines Flight 191 (273 dead) pic.twitter.com/KLadpGX7fC
— Planesanity (@planesanity) May 25, 2024
When Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashed in South Korea at the end of last year, meanwhile, an HD video of the accident was splashed on our phones within minutes — and none of us considered it unusual, except for the thought that this was happening more and more often. In fact, it’s happening less, thank God.
We just see it more — for better or for worse — and figure that it’s happening more. It isn’t, and there’s no evidence that our enemies are behind any of it.
“How and why do rogue judges get to decide who is fit for service in the military?”
It’s a good question how and why rogue judges get to decide anything via universal injunction — but that’s a topic that could take up an entire law school seminar, so I’ll limit this to what I believe you’re referring to: judges blocking President Trump’s attempt to reinstate the ban on self-described transgender military members.
The Trump administration officially requested that the Supreme Court allow it to enforce its ban on transgender troops in the military, something that’s been blocked by lower courts. Judge Benjamin Settle, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, ruled that he didn’t feel the administration had demonstrated the ban “is substantially related to achieving unit cohesion, good order or discipline.”
“Although the court gives deference to military decision making, it would be an abdication to ignore the government’s flat failure to address plaintiffs’ uncontroverted evidence that years of open transgender service promoted these objectives,” he wrote.
There is the question, of course, of whether administrations are bound by universal injunctions from lower courts, which can be handy in more trivial matters (copyright concerns, say; you don’t want to have to try an infringement case in every jurisdiction possible) but which are problematic when one judge in one corner of these United States can thwart legitimate policy aims legally executed.
It’s worth noting that, when Joe Biden was in office, Democrats certainly didn’t feel that they were bound by these injunctions. Here’s Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2023, going far enough that even Karoline Leavitt might tell her to tone it down if she were arguing on Trump’s behalf: “Ignore this ruling … You know, I think the interesting thing when it comes to a ruling is that it relies on enforcement. And it is up to the Biden administration to enforce, to choose whether or not to enforce such a ruling.”
Remember @AOC in 2023? This is what she said about judicial rulings after a Texas judge moved to suspend approval of the abortion pill:
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez:
“I think, we’ve been preparing and anticipating for there being these egregious overreaches by members of the judiciary… pic.twitter.com/OnfSD8DPYV
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) April 27, 2025
In the case of Trump, this marks the third time that reinstating a ban on transgender military members has been tied up in the courts.
Doe v. Trump, a 2017 case in which a transgender service member challenged the ban on Fifth Amendment grounds, ended with a preliminary injunction from U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who said there was no new evidence and Trump’s tweeting on the issue implied impulsivity, not careful review.
The ban was narrowed to “transgender persons with a history of gender dysphoria.” Then, after being kicked around the courts, the injunction was lifted in 2019, finding that deference to the military served the public interest — but it was mostly for naught, given the fact Joe Biden reversed the reversal in 2021.
A second key case, Karnoski v. Trump, challenged the revised policy as discriminatory. U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington Judge Marsha Pechman (there’s that district again!) also issued an injunction, ruling that “because transgender people have long been subjected to systemic oppression and forced to live in silence, they are a protected class.”
She insisted, “Any attempt to exclude them from military service will be looked at with the highest level of care, and will be subject to the Court’s ‘strict scrutiny.’ This means that before Defendants can implement the Ban, they must show that it was sincerely motivated by compelling interests, rather than by prejudice or stereotype, and that it is narrowly tailored to achieve those interests.”
However, in 2019, the Supreme Court stayed the preliminary injunction while it continued through the courts without ruling on whether it was constitutional … until, yet again, Biden’s reinstatement of transgender service members rendered it moot, again.
And here we are, back again with the Trump administration — a second one — trying to get this before the Supreme Court to solve it once and for all.
If this is making your head spin, well, I’m not trying to. It illustrates a larger point about the insanity of the universal injunction on major social and political matters. Shop for the correct venue, get the right judge, get a ruling that’s based on politics and not law, and run out the clock until it becomes too much of a resource-drain to pursue: This is, essentially, how the left believes the court system is supposed to work.
They’re already — to use one of the most insufferable, clanging neologisms of the Very Online™ left — “big mad” that two Trump terms and three Supreme Court justices means that they don’t get to use it as a de facto third legislative body anymore. But they do get to still exercise a kind of filibuster through cases like this and the endless litigation that surrounds them.
In this case, I agree with AOC for once: “Ignore this ruling … You know, I think the interesting thing when it comes to a ruling is that it relies on enforcement.” Until the Supreme Court — or, at least, a more august court higher up in the judicial hierarchy — weighs in, these universal injunctions are being used as calculated distractions, not legitimate applications of justice. They ought to be treated, and dismissed, as such.
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