I’m not discounting the exciting proposition of an out, gay candidate for any office. I yearn for far more diversity among our elected officials, but not at the expense of policies that will help the LGBTQ population, and us all.
Let me be clear. I, too, would sit on Mayor Pete’s face. But only to shut him the f**k up from saying all that racist shit. And that equivocation shit. And all that self-serving shit.
For a few weeks now I’ve been seeing Pete Buttigieg mania everywhere, especially among white, gay men: social media, corporate media, conversations with white, gay male friends. And it’s gotten to the point where I felt it necessary to dispel some myths about the two-term Democratic mayor from South Bend, Indiana.
Sure, Mayor Pete, as many call him, is smart. Sure, Mayor Pete is young. Sure, Mayor Pete is handsome (to me). Sure, Mayor Pete is gay. But what Mayor Pete is not is substantive.
Mayor Pete mania is exactly the kind of thing we should be checking, both within ourselves and our society overall.
The Facebook Zeitgeist
I’ve asked people what policies, specifically, of Buttigieg’s do they like. I’ve yet to receive an answer. Among associates on Facebook I’ve heard things like:
Andy Szekeres:
“Alan, you have such strong opinions on him. Which is your right but you’re becoming a gay Bernie bro. Don’t like him, don’t vote for him. Don’t like him, go volunteer for another campaign. Just exhaustingly throwing fit online is also another way to surely change some minds of who to vote for.”
Janice Rael:
“Alan have you read any of the 2 dozen interviews of Mayor Pete? He has LOTS of policy to talk about. He also speaks about "uniting the left," not "winning." Other Dem candidates only seem to care about fundraising and "winning" while Pete is talking policy. Please read some interviews. Nobody cares that he's gay.”
Tracy Meier:
"How long have you worked for the Trump re-election campaign, Alan? How many Dems does it take to stand in a circle and shoot each other?”
Nick Alexander:
“I also understand the importance of moderate voters who may decide to stay home on Election Day after hearing nothing but negative things about all of the dem candidates from their leftist friends.”
Notice how none of these people talk policy. They merely state opinions, not well-reasoned logic based on facts. Further, I’m not sure any of these people understand the purpose of vigorous debate and primary elections. It's as if they don’t have a clue at all what it is to be an active member of a democracy.
To take things a step further, let’s talk about who these doubters and smoke screeners are. Andy Szekeres is a Democratic Party and Nonprofit Industrial Complex operative whose business, Bison Fundraising Group, does not list its clients on its website, even though the site touts having raised “over 40 million dollars” for them. His website must be a bit out of date since his LinkedIn profile claims he’s raised “over 55 Million dollars for campaigns and nonprofits.”
Szekeres’ LinkedIn profile also lists him as the National Finance Director for The Centrist Project from September 2017–January 2018.
Centrist: (n) of or relating to centrists or to their political views; middle-of-the-road.
Sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton. We saw how well that went in 2016.
The other folks who defended Mayor Pete were simply misguided, thanks in part to the fulfillment of the mission of the late Edward Bernays. For those not aware, Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was the founder of the field of Public Relations. Public Relations is just another word for Propaganda.
The Radix of it All
Bernays was responsible for Suffragists and women in general smoking in public, leading to higher cancer rates and deaths of women.
When Betty Crocker was having a hard time selling their cake mix to women, because up until then women were taught that their worth was tied to them making meals from scratch, Bernays talked the corporation into adding an egg—an unnecessary ingredient—to its cake mix. By adding an egg, women felt like they were contributing to the making of the product. As a result, the cake mix started flying off the shelf.
Basically, any corporate sales manipulation we’ve ever fallen for in our lives is due to the work of Edward Bernays.
Prior to Bernays, products were sold in a more utilitarian way. Buy this product because it’s useful or necessary. After Bernays made his impact, products were no longer sold based on need but rather on desire.
Example of an advertisement from the 1800s
Lucky Strike advertisement following Bernays’ efforts to market to desires.
Bernays used the ideas behind his uncle’s work to his own financial gain. Freud worked towards understanding the reasons why people behave as they do. He posited that at the core of our decision making was what we now call the limbic system—our lizard brain. Without critical awareness of one’s behavior paired with intentional behavior modification, humans make decisions based on emotion, not logic.
Examine Thyself
As a white, gay man myself, I understand the appeal among white, gay men of Mayor Pete’s candidacy for president. From an identity standpoint, I can see myself in him.
As a 42-year old person who is emotionally and physically attracted to men, who has written extensively on male/male sex and love—and who has operated in white, gay male circles my whole adult life—I speak from a place of authority on what white, gay men, in particular, see in Buttigieg. For better or worse, sexual objectification is celebrated in gay culture. It is part of how we reclaimed our sexuality. And all of us are taught from birth the lie that whiteness reigns supreme.
Buttigieg represents the problematic nexus between my identity as a gay man, who does still objectify other men—and does so of Mayor Pete—and as a white man, who struggles to dismantle my own feelings around white supremacy that have poisoned me throughout my life. What I am asking of you is to move past seeing yourself in Mayor Pete or that you want to sleep with him—or any candidate for public office—and look at your own implicit biases and then cut right to Pete's policies.
During the Obama presidency, I had dreams about him on occasion. The dreams were focused on him and I hanging out, me wanting to smell him, me wanting to just be close to him.
Obama, like Buttigieg, is a handsome man to me. But I knew in my waking hours that how I felt about him in my dreams meant nothing for the policies—based on facts—that I demanded he advance. During his presidency, I didn’t handcuff myself to the White House fence because I wanted to cuddle with him. I did so to end employment discrimination in the armed forces for lesbian and gay Americans.
This decision to demand, by putting my body on the line, an end to the policy known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, was a difficult one for me. The last thing I wanted to do was to strengthen the Military Industrial Complex. But I knew that workplace discrimination was plain wrong. I kept my focus there, even though then and now I still question my decision to get involved with that fight.
So yes, I too want to gag on Pete’s butt like you. Yes, I said it. His last name looks like 'butt I gag'. I recognize that I am objectifying him when thinking of him this way. And I’m not sure how I feel about that.
The last thing I want to do is diminish another human. I wonder this too when I’m watching porn, especially bareback porn, which puts people at greater risk of STIs. I’m objectifying people, doing a job, yes, but also through my clicks, supporting sexual practices that I negotiate in my own life. Who doesn’t love to slide their raw dick into a hot, hairy or smooth hole or vice versa? #verspride #prepfacts #safersex
With that all out of the way, let’s focus now on Mayor Pete’s policies, not his peter. OK, I had to. It is suspiciously serendipitous that his first and last names are so euphemistic.
For those, like me, who want to see past Mayor Pete’s façade to his substance, let’s look at a few key issues that define his character and political ideology.
Pete Buttigieg supports… A system that does not eliminate private health insurance. His reasoning is simple. Due to tribalism, Republican voters, specifically, run away from Medicare for All when confronted with the plan as a Democratic idea.
So, instead of educating Americans about the plan and going for it, Buttigieg takes the same route Obama did when he passed the ostensibly named Affordable Care Act.
Any of us members of the Working Poor understood then—and do now—that private health insurance companies are death traps. Deny, deny, deny. And they suck billions of dollars each year out of our pockets and place them in the hands of publicly traded companies. Health insurance is NOT healthcare.
Anything less than the abolition of the private health insurance market is a capitulation to the corporate class. People are LITERALLY dying. The leading cause of bankruptcy in the US is due to medical costs and immoral gaps in coverage due to the existence of the Health Insurance-Industrial Complex.
Good luck, Mayor Pete, taking a chisel to a problem that needs a sledgehammer.
Racism
As mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg has supported the racist narrative that all lives matter. In 2015, at the annual “State of the City” address in South Bend, Buttigieg said:
“There is no contradiction between respecting the risks that police officers take every day in order to protect this community and recognizing the need to overcome the biases implicit in a justice system that treats people from different backgrounds differently, even when they are accused of the same offenses. We need to take both those things seriously, for the simple and profound reason that all lives matter.”
Just this week, Buttigieg spoke to reporters after a speech at the National Action Network’s annual convention in New York City. Addressing his 2015 speech, Buttigieg said, and transcribed verbatim here - since it is often the nuances of speech that reveal one's true intentions:
“At that time I was talking about a lot of issues around racial reconciliation in our community. What I did not understand at that time was that phrase [all lives matter] just early into mid—especially 2015—was coming to be viewed as a sort of counter-slogan to Black Lives Matter. Ah and so th—this statement seems very anodyne n n something tht tht’s kiyna nobody could be against actually wound up being used to devalue, ah, what the Black Lives Matter movement was telling us, which is what we needed to hear because unfortunately, ah it was not obvious to everybody. That black lives were being valued the same. And so that is the contribution of Black Lives Matter. It’s a reason why, since learning about how that phrase was being used to push back on that activism, I’ve stopped using it in that context.”
I don’t know about you, but in 2015, I was well aware of the difference between the message of Black Lives Matter and the racist slur, all lives matter. What does that say about a person who is the mayor of a city that is populated by well over 30 percent People of Color, that in 2015 Buttigieg didn’t know the difference? The whole point of the phrase Black Lives Matter is to drive forward the conversation that in America, our policies—past and present—have never shown that black and brown lives matter. You don’t need to be a Rhodes Scholar, like Buttigieg, to know or understand that.
While speaking at the National Action Network’s event itself, Buttigieg said:
“I believe an agenda for black Americans needs to include five things that all of us care about. Home ownership, entrepreneurship, education, health, and justice.”
It’s fair to say any sane person should want these things for all people.
The video then cuts to this next statement:
“We insist that being pro-minority and being pro-racial justice not only can but must be compatible with being pro-rule of law and respectful of law enforcement doing the right thing. It should enhance, not diminish, the value of a good police department, when we assert what should go without saying, but in these times must be said clearly and again and again—that black lives matter.”
Again, like in 2015, Buttigieg conflates ‘rule of law’ (read: respecting cops just because they're cops) racist nonsense with the fact that People of Color are disproportionately impacted by police brutality. The laws are broken. It’s that simple. They are set up to allow for police officers to MURDER and TERRORIZE People of Color. They always have been in America.
Sadly, Buttigieg received applause for invoking the words black lives matter.
Buttigieg’s meaning of the phrase ‘pro-rule of law’ is not connected to this violence and racism that police inflict on black and brown people and communities every day. His usage is in line with protecting the police force against reasonable and appropriate oversight and justice. This was clear in 2012 when Buttigieg sided with protecting police over black and brown people in his city.
A judge ruled that recorded phone calls that allegedly showed four senior police officers using racist language and discussing illegal acts could not be released to the public.
The phone line in question, initially used by officer Rick Bishop, was being recorded at Bishop’s request. Later, the phone lines were switched internally and Bishop’s line was transferred to officer Brian Young. Inadvertently, the line continued to be recorded. Eight recordings, one while the line was being used by Bishop and seven while Young was using it, were saved.
The judge ruled that the first recording could potentially be released since the line was being recorded at the request of Bishop, which was legal. The seven other recordings could not be released, the judge argued, due to the Federal Wiretap Act.
Buttigieg did nothing to add pressure for the release of the first tape.
Supreme Court
In a recent Fox ‘News’ interview, Buttigieg shared his idiot idea to increase the Supreme Court to 15 justices, with 10 of them being appointed as they are now, and the remaining five being appointed by a unanimous vote of sitting Supreme Court justices. Over time this would lead to more corporate hacks on the court, people more interested in playing it safe—whatever the f**k that means—than making the hard decisions to expand freedom and democracy, squash discrimination, and do what may be uncomfortable but right.
Or most importantly, his glaring lack of large-scale governing experience. What does it say of our nation that a low-level elected official can ascend to the presidency? The same thing it says of a man-baby with a silver spoon shoved up his ass becoming president.
As the tote bags, coffee mugs, and t-shirts say: Carry Yourself with the Confidence of a Mediocre White Man. If only life were that simple.
We deserve a f**k of a lot better than Mayor Pete.
If you don’t see the connection between the myth of centrism and white supremacy, corporatocracy, racism, patriarchy, et al., I suggest you get your head out of Buttigieg’s ass and put it into books that teach you real American history and critical thinking pedagogy. Like: