Pete Buttigieg is among the few Democrats not doubling down on crazy following the 2024 election.
"What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for?" Buttigieg said at a forum hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. He was joined by Justin Bibb, the mayor of Cleveland, and Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp.
"Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia (a show spoofing the culture of Portland), which I have also experienced,” he added, explaining "It is how it is how Trump Republicans are made. If that comes to your workplace with the best of intentions but doesn’t actually get at what actually matters here."
But we shouldn’t be fooled - he’s the exact kind of person he’s mocking.
Does anyone remember when he claimed that roads and bridges are racist?
Buttigieg once said at a press conference, with a straight face: “If a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or would have been, in New York, was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”
It’s complete nonsense, of course, but liberals did try to back him up on this, but didn’t get very far.
As conservatives roasted Buttigieg for the comical and borderline cartoonish picture he painted, the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler said that the claims were backed up by a book on urban developer Robert Moses called The Power Broker. Kessler quoted the following passage to defend Buttigieg:
[Robert Moses] began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouraging, long and arduous. For Negroes, who he considered inherently ‘dirty,’ there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, especially to Moses’s beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted off to parks many miles further on Long Island.
Kessler learned of the passage from his colleague Philip Bump, who wrote an entire article defending Buttigieg that quoted from The Power Broker.
Then, two days later, Kessler suddenly realized it was BS and tweeted out: “ADDENDUM: Experts increasingly doubt this story,” which was accompanied by an article he wrote explaining that it turns out this story about roads and bridges “has largely been debunked.” He also admitted that he was wrong to do a “knee-jerk” defense of Buttigieg accusing infrastructure of racism.
Furthermore, as the Washington Free Beacon's Collin Anderson noted, as Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, "he championed such training, with his administration implementing a series of diversity sessions that lectured cops on 'sizeism' and 'languageism' amid a surge in violent crime."
