The Rise of Pete Buttigieg: The Man Who Isn’t There

“Yesterday, upon a stair
“I met a man who wasn’t there
“He wasn’t there again today
“I wish, I wish he’d go away.”

-Hughes Mearns

This year, the Democratic Party caucus-goers of Midwest, prosperous Iowa and the voters of hard-scrabble, post-industrial, impoverished Granite State New Hampshire 1,342 miles (2,160 kilometers) away agreed on a historic decision:

They put the fantasy of a wonderful, First-Ever Lady President of the United States behind them and significantly tilted towards embracing a First-Ever, Openly Gay President instead.

This is the real meaning behind the rise of Pete Buttigieg to second place among caucus voters in Iowa (though narrowly leading there in the number of pledged delegates) and in New Hampshire, and of the dramatic decline of Senator Elizabeth Warren in both U.S. states.

Warren tried out different suits of political clothes and public policies through her endlessly promoted but always hollow and insubstantial campaign. None of them fitted convincingly on her.

Warren tried to be the candidate of the fake populist, fraudulent left championing Those In Need –a familiar trope.

She did not realize that Senator Bernie Sanders – significantly always a flinty Independent outside the Democratic Party mainstream – retained his rock-solid hold on his supporters from 2016.

By the time Warren – not at all the brightest of political light bulbs – realized her crucial mistake and tried to cut back to the Democrats’ so-called moderate center (the terms are actually meaningless, but universally swallowed by gullible Americans), it was too late.

In reality, there is a much stronger and far more plausible mainstream lady Democratic potential candidate.

Senator Amy Klobuchar comes from Minnesota and is far more a daughter of the vast American Heartland than Warren, who grew up in Ohio, but fled it to Massachusetts and the fake intellectual distinction of Harvard as quickly as she could.

Klobuchar is 20 years younger than Warren, far more controlled in public and not prone to Warren’s hysteria.

In terms of policy there is in reality little to differentiate them. But Klobuchar knows how to superficially talk to Heartland Americans without convincing them she regards them as dumb little poodle dogs –an absolutely vital requirement for any presidential contender in the 21st century United States. Warren, like Hillary Clinton before her, could never master that vital skill.

However, as the contest outcomes in radically contrasting Iowa and New Hampshire show, instead of Klobuchar’s genuinely solid record after 12 years in the United States Senate, Democratic voters are tilting towards Pete Buttigieg: a man who only been mayor of tiny (100,000 population) South Bend, Indiana – and a far from distinguished mayor at that.

Far from being Mr. Clean, Buttigieg in fact has a mysterious background in U.S. Naval Intelligence and an astonishing degree of public support from scores of senior officials in the Secret State.

In fact Buttigieg has never been what he appears to be. He was accepted to Pembroke College at Oxford University in England on a Rhodes scholarship – an elite path previously followed by President Bill Clinton, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and warmongering neocon columnist the late Charles Krauthammer among others.

He went to Harvard. He has literally scores of endorsements from extraordinarily high level officials in the CIA and throughout the U.S. intelligence community on his web site.

He was a successful employed consultant at McKinsey for three years. His career trajectory closely parallels that of President Emmanuel Macron of France, the supposedly super-smart, highly sheltered and arrogant little policy wonk always ready to ax the jobs and lives of hundreds of thousands of ordinary families on the sacred altar of “efficiency.”

Buttigieg served in the U.S. Navy Reserve in intelligence. He had a seven month deployment in Afghanistan in 2014 for which he was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal. Yet he never rose beyond the level of lieutenant – the bottom rank of officers. And he has all these Deep State endorsements.

In fact, in so far as Pete Buttigieg is typical of anything, it is not the Democratic Party, the American Midwest, the state of Indiana or the modest mini-city of South Bend he has so manifestly failed to run impressively.

Instead, Buttigieg is the latest classic example of what in these columns a year ago (March 29, 2019) I described as the phenomenon of the “Boy Toys” apparently cloned by the CIA as supposedly harmless puppets to (pretend to) run the West.

As I wrote at the time, there is an astonishing element of similarity to all these figures. They are all in their forties or late 30s (Buttigieg is 38). They could all pass as teenagers. They all project an attempted air of wholesomeness and earnest idealism which their records reveal as utterly fraudulent. And none of them has any record of distinction in either domestic or international affairs.

“Little Pete” Buttigieg fits this profile eerily: Like the rest of them, he was plucked from nowhere on the basis of nothing more profound than his willingness to swallow the same old internationalist, liberal, free trade party line to cover endless aggressions, fostered coups, civil wars and other crimes against humanity.

Buttigieg, like his fellow Boy Toys is also a perfect candidate to be, in the wonderful words with which Alice Roosevelt Longworth dismissed 1948 U.S. presidential candidate Tom Dewey, the little toy man on top of a giant wedding cake.

The Mighty Mayor of South Bend is also a convincing candidate to be the Last Ever President of the United States: For he is the natural successor to Romulus Augustulanus, the ludicrous teenage last legal emperor of Rome (for less than a year) in 475-6 AD.

What a way to go.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.