Pete Buttigieg for President? The Dem’s Newest Media-anointed “Phenom”

“Pete who? Pete Buttigieg? Never heard of him.” That would have been the standard response up until a couple of weeks ago, unless one happens to be a resident of South Bend, Indiana, where Buttigieg has been serving as mayor for the past seven years. But “Mayor Pete” now wants to be president of the United States, and the media elites have been tripping over each other to transform him from a political unknown into the latest Democrat “rock star.” The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Newsweek, The Atlantic, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, PBS, and the rest of the Fake News conglomerate can’t get enough of him, or do enough for him.

Doors magically opened for the new “phenom” for appearances with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Jake Tapper on a CNN Town Hall, Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press, Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, Seth Meyers on Late Night, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah … and all the rest.

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David Brooks, the faux conservative at the New York Times, gushed that Buttigieg’s meteoric rise is “the biggest star-is-born moment since Lady Gaga started singing ‘Shallow.’”

“Right now, you could make the case that Pete Buttigieg’s $7 million is the single most impressive fundraising report we’ve seen from any of the candidates,” NBC’s Chuck Todd said. “While he didn’t raise more than Bernie [Sanders] and he didn’t raise more than Kamala Harris or Beto O’Rourke, all three of them all had fundraising committees in place over the last two or three years — or, in Bernie’s case, the last ten. Pete Buttigieg is doing this for the first time for the last four months, so his $7 million was the most organic and came literally starting from scratch, in that he didn’t even have a big email list.”

Chuck Todd, of course, cannot be unaware of the fact that Buttigieg has been catapulted to instant stardom with millions of dollars of free, adulatory media attention and that that has everything to do with the buzz that has generated his windfall of campaign cash. His CNN Town Hall exposure, for instance, produced “an explosion of social media followers and funding,” South Bend’s NBC affiliate WNDU reported on March 26.

CNN’s editor-at-large Chris Cilizza declared on March 22 that Buttigieg “is the hottest candidate in the 2020 race right now.”

Newsweek reported on March 24 that, according to the latest Emerson poll of the Iowa caucuses, Buttigieg had jumped to third place among the 2020 Democrat presidential candidates. “Taking 11 percent, Buttigieg, who is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, still trailed former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, who took 25 percent and 24 percent, respectively, in the survey conducted by Emerson Polling, The Hill reported. But the poll suggests a strong surge in interest in the 37-year-old mayor after numerous high-profile media appearances over the past couple months.”

And “Mayor Pete,” who is still in the “exploratory stage,” hasn’t even formally announced his candidacy, though he is expected to do so on April 14.

The media mavens dutifully regurgitate the gushing descriptions of the candidate that have been handed them by the Buttigieg campaign. Daily Show host Trevor Noah provides a typical example of the star-struck treatment. Here is his fan-boy intro for Buttigieg: “He’s a veteran, a Harvard graduate, and a Rhodes Scholar who’s openly gay and also so young that if he served two terms as president, when he came out he would still only be 46. Plus, he’s a concert pianist and speaks seven languages, including Norwegian, which he learned just so that he could read Norwegian books.”

What’s more, exclaimed Noah, Buttigieg is pristine pure and immaculately clean: “There’s no dirt on this guy. Like, nothing.”

Well, let’s not be too hasty to confer sainthood on “Mayor Pete” just yet. After all, these are the same media opinionators who declared Hillary Clinton the most qualified candidate ever to run for the White House, while dutifully covering up her cesspool of crime and scandal.

And it’s the same media cabal that carried on a two-year witch hunt against President Donald Trump — and is still flogging the discredited Trump-Russia collusion theme, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found no evidence to substantiate it. And it’s the same media lie machine that has turned unknowns Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke into instant political sex symbols, while ignoring their heavy baggage (see here and here).

Buttigieg, Gramsci, and the Communist Culture War

But, back to “Mayor Pete,” the sobriquet he cheerily urges people (including confused media commentators) to use if they have trouble pronouncing his name. First off, how does one pronounce his name? Booty-geeg? Butty-jeej? Butty-jeeg? Phonetic attempts are doomed to fail. Buttigieg himself says the name is pronounced “Boot-Edge-Edge.” But the other Mr. Buttigieg, Pete’s “husband” provides a slightly different pronunciation. The mayor’s “spouse,” Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, pronounces the name “Buddha-Judge.”

During the CNN Town Hall, Jake Tapper used the name pronunciation discrepancy to crack a joke that would allow him to bounce over the much larger elephant in the room. “I don’t want to get in the middle of a marital squabble,” said Tapper. “I feel like you said your way was right. But then you did not throw your husband under the bus which is, I guarantee you that is the right path, I guarantee.”

It is obvious that the media and cultural elites believe (or hope) the American public may have been sufficiently conditioned by “The Queering of America” over the past three decades that voters may now be willing to go for a candidate who would occupy the White House with his “First Man.” What was once unthinkable is now, the elites think, eminently doable.

In his New York Times column entitled “Why You Love Mayor Pete,” David Brooks claims that Buttigieg is so attractive because he “detaches progressive policy from the culture war.” Americans, says Brooks, “are sick of the moral melodrama altogether. They just want a person who is more about governing than virtue-signaling, more about friendliness and basic decency than media circus and rhetorical war.”

“Buttigieg’s secret,” Brooks asserts, “is that he transcends many of the tensions that run through our society in a way that makes people on all sides feel comfortable.”

And what about the Americans who don’t “feel comfortable” with a homosexual president and his “husband” occupying the White House? Never mind them, they’re just the dying homophobic minority, according to Brooksian elites who have been leading the attacks on Christian culture.

Contrary to David Brooks’ claims, Buttigieg’s candidacy is a precisely aimed culture war bomb. He was groomed from childhood for the Culture War. His father, Professor Joseph Buttigieg, who died this past January, was one of the world’s leading experts on Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist theoretician that Marxists the world over look to for guidance on waging the war on Christian culture. We noted a decade and a half ago, in “Morality Meltdown: The Culture War Waged by America’s Liberal Elite”: “A ‘culture war’ has been raging all about us for many decades. The forces of organized decadence are waging this war according to the detailed battle plans laid out by Italian Communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s and ’30s. The Gramscian strategy called for a long, patient march to capture the cultural “mediating institutions”— the media, schools, universities, churches, civic organizations, publishing, and entertainment — to overturn entrenched religious and cultural values.”

Professor Buttigieg, who taught at the University of Notre Dame for nearly four decades, was no neutral, dispassionate academic studying a modern subversive movement. He was a passionate evangelist for Gramsci’s gospel of longterm, patient revolution. He was the translator and editor of the three-volume English edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. He was also a founding member of the International Gramsci Society and served as its president.

The Notre Dame professor was also a regular speaker and participant in the annual Socialist Scholars Conferences held at the City University of New York (CUNY) from 1983-2004, which brought together radical Marxists of all stripes, including hardcore leaders of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

Communist “Manifestivity”

Trevor Loudon’s ever-informative Keywiki website’s entry for Professor Buttigieg provides this interesting detail:

On October 30 and 31, 1998 the Brecht Forum presented the “Communist Manifestivity to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto” at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, New York.

Individual endorsers of the event included Joseph Buttigieg.

One of the many workshops at the Manifestivity was:

Can We Go from Cultural Imperialism to World Culture? with Amiri Baraka, Aijaz Ahmad, Joseph Buttigieg, Annette Rubinstein, Sonia Sanchez and N’Gugi Wa Thiongo. Moderator: Colleen Roach.

Keywiki further notes:

The College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University hosted “Gramsci Now: Cultural and Political Theory,” an international symposium to mark the 70th anniversary of the death of Antonio Gramsci, November 9-11, 2007 in East Lansing, Michigan, USA.

Presenters were: Stanley Aronowitz, Joseph Buttigieg, Kate Crehan, Roberto Dainotto, Michael Denning, Benedetto Fontana, Stephen Gill, Marcia Landy, Guido Liguori, Frank Rosengarten, David Ruccio, Epifanio San Juan.

The American people may not be quite ready to embrace an LGBTQ red diaper baby like Pete Buttigieg in 2020. And his media-created sizzle may quickly fizzle as he is subjected to real scrutiny. But the Deep State elites likely figure that the media’s over-the-top infatuation with their new darling will transfer to “progressive” Millennials, whom they expect to play an ever bigger political role in 2024 and beyond.