1. Failed Small town mayor?
2. Radical left, not moderate
Of all the Democratic presidential candidates, the most duplicitous may be Mayor Pete.
He supports the Green New Deal, the multi-trillion dollar AOC scheme to destroy capitalism in this country.
He supports abortion even as the baby is making its way out of the birth canal.
He wants to significantly raise the taxes on middle-class families and give the US one of the highest corporate tax in the world. Much of the money raised by the Buttigieg Tax Hikes will be spent providing free healthcare to Illegal immigrants.
He wants to rejoin the Iranian Nuclear Deal and the Paris Climate Accord.
Yet he claims he’s a moderate that will unite the country and attract Republicans.
He must know he’s not a “moderate” or a “centrist” or any of these labels MSDNCNN is attaching to him, but he will continue to embrace these dishonest labels as long as they benefit his campaign.
3. Anti Israel
His appeal is much like Obama's. He is an smooth crooner who hides his thin resume, questionable achievements and radical agenda under grammatically and politically correct rhetoric. Please note that he has joined the Bernie boat in worrying more about "justice" for Gaza than on our ally, Israel. South Bend, Indiana’s Mayor Pete Buttigieg told a radical anti-Israel group that Israel’s “occupation” was a problem after being ambushed by the group during campaign appearances in New Hampshire this weekend.
The group, IfNotNow, is a left-wing fringe organization that defended Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) when she used antisemitic language to attack supporters of Israel. It has also recited prayers for Hamas terrorists killed while trying to infiltrate Israel.
4. Staffer anti semitie Deven Anderson, who recently joined Pete Buttigieg's (D.) presidential campaign as a regional organizing director in Columbia, S.C., has a history of praising anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and attended a sermon where Farrakhan said "You can walk with a Jew, but you can't walk with me."
4. Staffer anti semitie Deven Anderson, who recently joined Pete Buttigieg's (D.) presidential campaign as a regional organizing director in Columbia, S.C., has a history of praising anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and attended a sermon where Farrakhan said "You can walk with a Jew, but you can't walk with me."
Between April 2010 and August 2013, Anderson tweeted more than 20 times about Farrakhan, praising his sermons and tweeting out quotes. Two days before Farrakhan spoke at Union Temple Baptist on April 25, 2010, in southeast Washington, D.C., Anderson tweeted about planning to attend the sermon.
Radical Pete buttwhatever
Crawling out of the Iowa fiasco with a 0.1% lead over the openly socialist Bernie Sanders, Mayor Pete Buttigieg heads into New Hampshire with assigned label as 'the moderate alternative' for the increasingly leftist Democrat Party. Don't be fooled; Pete Buttigieg is no moderate.
Crawling out of the Iowa fiasco with a 0.1% lead over the openly socialist Bernie Sanders, Mayor Pete Buttigieg heads into New Hampshire with assigned label as 'the moderate alternative' for the increasingly leftist Democrat Party. Don't be fooled; Pete Buttigieg is no moderate.
So, who is Pete Buttigieg? Just look at his 'revered' father, Dr. Joseph Buttigieg, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he was a faculty member for nearly 40 years. Dr. Buttigieg was a proponent of the work of Antonio Gramsci, considered the 'godfather' of cultural Marxism.
Gramsci was the founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy. Unlike Russia's Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin, Gramsci rejected violent overthrow of capitalist governments in favor of gradual revolution through communist infiltration of the culture and societal structures, implementing socialism through what his disciple Rudi Dutschke called "the long march through the institutions." Gramsci believed changing ideology in the ruling elite, whether in media, education, courts, politics or other structures, was more powerful and enduring than bloody revolution. Gramsci's principle was that Communists must begin by influencing the culture, winning the intellectuals, the teachers, implanting itself in the press, the media, the publishing houses.
Sound familiar? It should. It's happening here already. It's been implemented by the Democrat Party in the 1930's, and really took-off in the 60's. Look at the socialist indoctrination centers we call public schools and leftist propaganda outlets we call the media. Look at the activist judges who ignore the will of the People when they overturn election results. It's the trend of cultural decay that Donald Trump is trying to reverse.
Bottom line? Pete Buttigieg is no moderate. Like Barack Obama, being mentored by the communists Frank Marshall Davis and William Ayers, Buttigieg is just another in the line of subversive totalitarians, who's intention is to impose state control on the nation and the People of the United States. We cannot let that happen. November 3rd will be a watershed moment in our history. It is time for those who prefer freedom over slavery to stand and be counted!!
Mayor Pete’s South Bend Record
The issue isn’t that his city is small. It’s how he performed as a leader.
Pete Buttigieg is rising in the Democratic presidential polls on his rhetorical gifts, distinctive resumé and fund-raising prowess. But the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has so far largely received a pass on his government record from the press and even other Democrats. That isn’t likely to continue, and a good place to start is his trouble controlling violent crime.
Violence has dropped sharply throughout the U.S. over the past two decades as a result of improved policing, more incarceration and demographic changes. But crime rates have diverged among cities with similar demographics based on local policies. South Bend, with a population of 102,000 and poverty rate of 25%, has one of the poorer records.
ISince Mr. Buttigieg became mayor in 2012, the city’s violent crime has surged 70% compared to about 10% Indiana-wide. Violent crime has declined 2% in the U.S. in the same period despite a transient uptick in 2015 and 2016 amid a backlash against police following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
South Bend police say a change in how data was reported to the FBI in 2016 caused aggravated assaults to spike that year. But violence has continued to increase in the city while declining in other mid-sized cities in Indiana. Last year the violent crime rate in South Bend was higher than in Chicago.
Mr. Buttigieg says violence in South Bend is comparable to cities with similar poverty. But the poverty rate in Evansville, Indiana, is 2.1 percentage points lower than in South Bend yet its violent crime is about half as high. Gary, Indiana, has a poverty rate of 36%, though its violent crime rate is 50% lower than in South Bend. Violent crime in South Bend dropped during the recession and hit a nadir in 2012. But it has climbed since Mr. Buttigieg became mayor. This raises questions about competence and priorities because a mayor’s foremost responsibility is to protect public safety.
The causes are hard to pinpoint. But one persistent problem is a longstanding lack of trust between police and the community that Mr. Buttigieg hasn’t improved. He demoted the city’s first black police chief in 2012 amid an FBI investigation into his taping phone calls of white officers. Maybe the demotion was justified, but many in the community weren’t convinced.
The millennial mayor then hired a white police chief from New Bedford, Massachusetts., who shared his technocratic tendencies but was opposed by rank-and-file officers and the City Council. Mr. Buttigieg wasn’t able to build consensus, which might have eased racial tension. The new chief resigned after three years without progress reducing crime.
Current chief Scott Ruszkowski is well-liked by officers and minorities, but he has also failed to stanch the bloodshed or improve police morale. One reason may be the mayor’s progressive law-enforcement policies such as body cameras and implicit-bias training that have made officers wary of confrontation.
After a white officer fatally shot a black man in June, Mayor Pete rebuked police recruits: “In our past and present, we have seen innumerable moments in which racial injustice came at the hands of those trusted with being instruments of justice.” He also sent an email to campaign supporters saying “All police work and all of American life takes place in the shadow of racism.”
That was a bow to the national social-justice left but it didn’t help morale among cops on the streets in South Bend. The city has struggled to recruit police officers and has 15 fewer than budgeted for next year. The shortage has made it harder to patrol communities and respond to calls.
Many potential recruits fail the required written exam, and they aren’t helped by South Bend’s schools. The city’s high school graduation rate has declined to 77%—about 11 points lower than statewide—from 83% in 2015. Failing schools may also be contributing to higher crime since most violence is perpetrated by young men who aren’t in school or employed.
***
In Wednesday’s debate, Mr. Buttigieg contrasted his experience in what he called a “small” city with the “small” politics of Washington. It was a shrewd play to become the fresh outsider voice. But the issue isn’t that South Bend is small so much as what he did with the opportunity to lead.
Mayor Pete served for eight years as an intelligence officer in the Navy, including seven months in Afghanistan, and worked as a consultant at McKinsey. But his government experience is limited to running South Bend. Democratic voters will want to inspect that record before they anoint him as the great millennial hope to defeat Donald Trump.
If you had any doubts about the embrace of socialism by the 2020 Democratic presidential field, they should be gone by now. One of Indiana’s own potential contenders — South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg — has jumped into the collectivist basket with both feet.
Although acknowledging that America has a market-based economy and is “committed to democracy,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that a discussion about a policy can no longer be “killed off” by declaring that it’s socialism.
He denounced President Trump’s damnation of socialism during his State of the Union address as an outmoded strategy of the Cold War era when “you saw a time in politics when the world socialism could be used to end an argument.” Today, he said, a word like socialism is the “beginning of a debate.”
I’m not sure how Buttigieg squares “market-based economy” and “committed to democracy” with beginning a debate with the word socialism, but fine. Let the arguments begin.
I’ll leave it to the economists to explain how command economies smother competition and thwart growth, condemning whole populations to an equality of misery.
I’ll let the military experts detail the millions of people from Russia to China and Cambodia to Venezuela who have been sacrificed in the futile search for socialist utopia.
I will hope the historians explain why the American Revolution was so much more sensible and, yes, moral than the French Revolution.
I will defer to the clear-eyed empiricists to answer the chief arguments of the statist apologists who answer the complaint that “socialism has never worked” with “real socialism has never been tried” and “all socialist efforts have been thwarted by evil capitalist tyrants.”
I will even forgo my usual cynical assessment that this country has socialized capitalism so much that the only real question up for debate is how much more socialist it will become, and how quickly.
But I will make a small effort to express my strong objections to the philosophical underpinnings of socialism. Despite all the variations government experiments have explored over the centuries, there are really only two fundamental approaches. Government either celebrates the individual or it demands subservience to the group. There is freedom or there is no freedom. And that is it.
Of all the values we prize as human beings, freedom should be the most important. If we have freedom, all things are possible. If we do not have freedom, none are. This country was founded on the idea of freedom — that rights inhere in the individual — that, in Jefferson’s words, “that government is best which governs the least.”
Capitalism, with all its inequalities, uncertainties and other bumps along the road, is the logical economic system of that belief.
And socialism is its antithesis.
Any system that has as its foundation the subservience of the individual to the group will eventually elevate the group to the point where the individual no longer matters. The idea that an elite few has both the obligation and the ability to dictate the welfare of all will mature into the idea that those few have the right to control everyone.
And that is tyranny.
We don’t even have to follow that arrogance to its logical, bloody and inevitable conclusion to be a little frightened.
Just consider the economies of states like Illinois and California that are nearing collapse as governments reach and surpass the ability to give away other people’s money.
Just consider the cliff on which the federal government teeters with its trillions in debt, borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends. That which cannot continue will not continue. If the idea of tyranny doesn’t frighten you, what do you think about anarchy?
Or think about the Green New Deal, the American socialists’ current version of utopia for this country. It aims, in a single decade, to eliminate fossil fuels, retrofit every house in America and return agriculture to subsistence levels. The effect on American life would be enormous, the cost incalculable. As far as I can tell, the point of such ecological zealotry is to save the environment by making the country unlivable.
Mayor Buttigieg loves the Green New Deal. He says it is "the right beginning" for a broad plan to combat climate change.
The beginning? Forgive me for my outmoded thinking, but that’s a debate ender for me.
Leo Morris is a columnist for The Indiana Policy Review. Contact him at leoedits@yahoo.com.
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