Free Republic

In early 2020, we received multiple inquiries from readers about the accuracy of a 10-month-old article which purported to highlight the left-wing ideology of Joseph Buttigieg, a prominent academic and the late father of Democratic presidential primary contender Pete Buttigieg. The article, published in April 2019 by the right-leaning Washington Examiner, was later shared on social media at a time when the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, appeared to perform well in the disputed Iowa caucuses, and joined U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in leading the polls ahead of the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 11. The Washington Examiner piece bore...

The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin. Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel's more doctrinaire theories, though...