Free Republic

“And I think: It is time for moral leadership to be restored to the White House,” he said. “So when you are ready to share that deepest truth about yourself, when you are ready to step out of the closet you step out into something hopeful and inclusive, and you look up to Washington and you see a president who cares about you and loves you.”

CONCORD, N.H. — Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Saturday said religious conservatives are making a “deal with the devil” so the federal judiciary can be stacked with nominees from a Republican president. “Does anybody really think that religious conservatives view Donald Trump as a religious [figure]?” Mr. Buttigieg said. “They’re riding a tiger, they’re making a deal with the devil knowing that they can get certain objectives met on the bench.” Mr. Buttigieg and other 2020 Democratic presidential contenders were appearing Saturday morning at a forum on the judiciary hosted by several liberal advocacy groups at a community...

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg claimed last month that “everything that we have proposed has been paid for, and we have proposed no tax increase on the middle class.” The South Bend, Ind., mayor is incorrect on both counts: He hasn’t said how he’d pay for all his proposed spending. He has endorsed one explicit tax increase on the middle class, and his recent retirement plan provides an outline for another. Add it up, and middle-class workers could face a trillion dollars in new taxes. To support family caregivers, Mr. Buttigieg’s retirement plan restated his prior commitment to enact “an...

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg blasted Vice President Mike Pence and other Christian politicians this week for adopting what he charged were un-Christian political stances. Asked by Religion News whether he would call “sinful” those Christian politicians who supported the Trump administration’s since-scrapped policy of separating families arrested after crossing the southern border illegally, Buttigieg declined to go that far. “I’ll be careful to use that word to kind of point out a speck in my brother’s eye,” the South Bend, Ind. mayor replied. “What I would say is that it’s clear that some naked sins are being at best...

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg may have an uphill battle drawing some Iowa voters to his blend of progressive politics and religion. Buttigieg "comes off as a great guy," said Bob Vander Plaats, president of conservative Iowa Christian organization The Family Leader, but "his policies don't align with where we believe Scripture is and where we believe the faith is at and what's in the best interest of our country." "If the policies don’t line up, I think Iowans — and more than that Americans who are evangelical — are wise enough to see through that," Vander Plaats told...

As South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg commands national attention with his media-savvy presidential bid, the firestorm back home over an officer-involved shooting shows no sign of settling soon -- with the mayor facing criticism not only from protesters but police who say his handling has crushed morale and risks a “mass exodus” from the force. “Morale around here has been terrible. We do nothing,” one police officer, a 20-year veteran of the force, told Fox News. “We call ourselves firemen, we sit around in parking lots until we’re called and then we go to the call, because if you say...

Mayor Pete Buttigieg continues warning of the rising threat of white nationalism, telling voters in Iowa over the weekend he believed that it was the most deadly form of terrorism in the United States.

Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 33 has a sculpture of two 20-foot wrenches emerging from the mud out by its pocked parking lot in Des Moines, Iowa. Inside, a public bathroom features a shower adorned with gone-gray towels and multiple containers of industrial-strength body wash, presumably for cleaning up after some kind of toxic toilet encounter. It is all very manly. *** The crowd goes wild! OK, maybe NPR singles-night wild. Still, there is light in their eyes as they contemplate replacing our porn-star-banging, syntax-mangling president with a 37-year-old gay Rhodes scholar/Afghanistan veteran who likes to install Wi-Fi sensors in...

A South Bend, Indiana police union on Monday criticized Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s (D) handling of a recent police shooting in the city, saying his focus is predicated “solely for his political gain.” Last week, Buttigieg was forced to temporarily leave his 2020 presidential campaign trail to hold what was a tense town hall with the South Bend police chief Scott Ruszkowski after an officer fatally shot Eric Logan, a 54-year-old African-American man who was allegedly breaking into vehicles with a knife. In a blistering letter shared to Facebook, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #36 stated Buttigeieg’s response to the...

Black voters in South Bend, Ind., have vocally opposed Mayor Pete Buttigieg, blaming him for leaving the city to campaign for president amid the tense aftermath of a police shooting that claimed the life of a 54-year-old black man. The tensions broke out afresh at a town hall event on Sunday evening."We don't trust you!" a woman hollered as Buttigieg attempted to address the issue, The Los Angeles Times reported.Last Sunday, Sergeant Ryan O'Neill shot and killed 54-year-old Eric Jack Logan. Logan was allegedly breaking into cars with a knife in hand. O'Neill has been accused of racist behavior by...

Pete and Chasten Buttigieg celebrated their first wedding anniversary on Sunday. You know this if you’re among Pete’s roughly 1.1 million Twitter followers or Chasten’s 340,000, because they traded sweetly effusive missives, as they frequently do. Pete gushed: “One year ago I married the love of my life. I’m so thankful I found you, Chasten, and can’t wait to spend the rest of our life together.” Chasten posted pictures of the two of them with their arms around each other, which he introduced by writing that he was on his way “to find this cute guy on the trail. Can’t...

Chasten Buttigieg, husband to South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), said he's proud of the progress that has been made in the gay rights movement leading to his husband's presidential candidacy, but warned that there is still a long way to go "for equality." "The fight for equality is far from over," Buttigieg said Monday at a Democratic National Convention gala for LGBTQ rights in New York. "I wish I could stand here and tell you that all of the responses to my husband running for president have either been positive or that the criticisms have simply been about...

ete Buttigieg told "Axios on HBO" that although he wasn't diagnosed with PTSD after returning from Afghanistan after a 7-month deployment in 2014, "there's a level of depression ... that I went through when I came back." Why it matters: This is a new window into Buttigieg's unusual experience of serving as a 32-year-old, then returning to resume his job as mayor of South Bend, Indiana....... Buttigieg told me the feeling lasted about a year, and that he never felt he needed medical treatment.

Everyone who’s anyone has heard of Mayor Pete, right? He had his breakout performance during a CNN townhall in March and drew strong ratings during his Fox News townhall in May. President Trump has even been talking about Pete Boot-edge-edge during rallies. At the end of April, Politico Magazine ran a profile of Lis Smith, the Democratic operative behind Buttigieg’s aggressive media strategy: In the past several months, Buttigieg has been not just all over cable and in the newspapers, but in Our Daily Planet, an environmental morning newsletter with just over 5,000 Twitter followers; in a financial planning podcast...

Brit Hume delivers his reaction to Sunday's FOX News town hall event for Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Hume said it will be "interesting" to see how Buttigieg measures up to former Vice President Joe Biden if they are on the same debate stage together. "I think Pete Buttigieg is the most impressive by far candidate in terms of just raw political talent in the Democratic field. And he may be the most impressive candidate I've seen since the emergence of Barack Obama," Hume said Monday. "Just in terms of being comfortable with himself and being fast on his feet...

In a significant way, "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg is the embodiment of his father Joseph — and, by extension, Antonio Gramsci. Buttigieg Senior was a professor of critical theory and the relationship between culture and politics at Notre Dame University from 1980 until his retirement in 2017.  (The man, a smoker who wouldn't quit, died of lung cancer in 2019.)  Academically, Joseph Buttigieg spent his entire professional life editing the journals of Antonio Gramsci.  According to a N.D. alumni newsletter, Professor Buttigieg's work on Gramsci has been spread far and wide, with his work having been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. ...

The Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace was humiliated Sunday as he allowed Pete Buttigieg (D-IN) to walk all over him with insults and lies. During Sunday’s New Hampshire town hall, Mean Little Mayor Pete trashed Wallace’s Fox News colleagues — two of the network’s biggest stars (Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham ) directly to Wallace’s face and Wallace said nothing in their defense: ... Honestly, this is the first time I have ever witnessed something like this… In all my years of watching the media, never before have I seen a purported news anchor remain silent as one of his...

Has the liberal media ever met a Democrat it couldn't characterize as a centrist? Take Barack Obama. He had the most liberal voting record in the Senate. But that didn't stop Politico, for example, from in 2008 publishing "Obama’s steady centrism." That same kind of false advertising was on display on today's Morning Joe regarding Pete Buttigieg. The panel was gaga over Buttigieg's town hall performance of last night on Fox News, leading Joe Scarborough to declare: "This guy is going to play an important role in the mainstreaming of the Democratic Party for many years to come. And believe...

The race for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States continues to intensify as energy builds from the almost weekly announcements of a new candidate vying for the nomination. Most recently, Vice President Joe Biden officially announced his candidacy for Commander and Chief. It came as no surprise, but now he is officially in. The surprise in the race is a candidate who has captured the continued (and largely adoring) gaze of the media. His name appears relentlessly in the headlines from every major media outlet. He has become a national sensation—and he is a name that very...

RUSH: Mayor Pete took the train to Sylvia’s in Harlem yesterday. Was it yesterday? I guess it was yesterday. (interruption) It was yesterday. Now, the reason he did that was to meet with the Reverend Sharpton. Now, I have a different take on this. The Drive-By Media look at it as, “This is Mayor Pete. This is really smart on Mayor Pete’s part. He’s going up to Harlem and he’s talking to the Reverend Sharpton about black people, and he’s trying to get knowledge on the background of black people. He’s trying to learn about black people, even after firing...