Pete Buttigieg is a towering intellect. A man whose mind is a Cathedral, so vast that running the Department of Transportation requires only a tiny slice of his intellectual capability.

America, you are not worthy of his notice, but he is so generous and compassionate that he deigns to devote a small percentage of his time to building trains for you.

The trains may not stay on the track, of course, but that is not the point.

With a remarkable blend of intellect and empathy, Pete Buttigieg brings a fresh perspective to the forefront of public discourse. https://t.co/mzbXgnvkSv

📷: ​​Argus Paul Estabrook pic.twitter.com/KzI3qKrIA2

— WIRED (@WIRED) May 18, 2023

This is the story we are fed in WIRED, which used to cover emerging technology long ago and far away. I even subscribed for a year, on one of those ridiculous $4/year deals you occasionally get. That was more than 20 years ago if I remember correctly, but whatever.

THE CURIOUS MIND of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard’s Spring—though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.

Uh, what? Did nobody tell the author, Virginia Heffernan, that Buttigieg is a married gay man and likely not interested in the obvious crush she has on him?

Heffernan, a former New York Times columnist (of course) and English Ph.D. from Harvard (of course), writes a piece so insane that only a former New York Times columnist and Harvard Ph.D. could possibly take it seriously.

Buttigieg has become famous for being the most incompetent Secretary of Transportation in U.S. history. Whatever he has touched has turned to crap. Trains filled with poison derail. The air traffic control system fails. The supply chain collapses. Cargo ships cannot unload.

Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that the cathedral that is his mind pays so little attention to his job?

No, of course not. He is brilliant. He, too, is an intellectual with a Harvard background, so he must be.

Being lazy I am stealing this educational history of Buttigieg from Wikipedia, to give you a flavor of his accomplishments:

Buttigieg was valedictorian of the class of 2000 at St. Joseph High School in South Bend.[18][19] That year, he won first prize in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum’s Profiles in Courage essay contest. He traveled to Boston to accept the award and met Caroline Kennedy and other members of President Kennedy’s family. The subject of his winning essay was the integrity and political courage of then U.S. representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of only two independent politicians in Congress.[20][21][d] In 2000, Buttigieg was also chosen as one of two student delegates from Indiana to the United States Senate Youth Program,[23] an annual scholarship competition sponsored jointly by the U.S. Senate and the Hearst Foundations.[24]

After graduating from St. Joseph High School, Buttigieg attended Harvard University, where he majored in history and literature.[25] He became president of the Student Advisory Committee of the Harvard Institute of Politics and worked on the institute’s annual study of youth attitudes on politics.[26][27] He wrote his undergraduate thesis, titled The Quiet American’s Errand into the Wilderness, on the influence of Puritanism on U.S. foreign policy as reflected in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American.[28][29] He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2004, and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[30][31]

Buttigieg was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford.[30][32] In 2007, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in philosophy, politics, and economics after studying at Pembroke College, Oxford.[33][34][35][36] At Oxford, he was an editor of the Oxford International Review,[37] and was a co-founder[37] and member of the Democratic Renaissance Project, an informal debate and discussion group of approximately a dozen Oxford students.[38][39]

An impressive resume! Which in the modern world tells you that he is an idiot of the first order.

Buttigieg gets his idiocy honestly. His father was a translator and editor of the three-volume English edition of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Gramsci was the man who introduced the concept of the Marxist “long march through the institutions,” which laid out the plan to take over academia, education, cultural institutions, and eventually politics by infiltrating them and turning them against capitalism.

Huh. Sound familiar?

Buttigieg has developed a reputation among Leftists as a benign, intelligent, and moderate face of the Leftist movement. A perfect type to perform that long march, fooling the bourgeoisie into thinking that Marxism is pretty nice, actually. I don’t know if he is a Marxist himself, but he certainly has been an agent of destruction in American society. Either it is his goal that everything he touches is destroyed, or simply a side effect of his love of Norwegian literature, which is famously bleak.

It is a fact that Buttigieg wants to become president, having run for the job, and it is actually conceivable that he could be a worse president than Biden. That would be, needless to say, a remarkable accomplishment. He could also be the first president who enjoys Norwegian literature, which should please the Harvard types.

Buttigieg, whose father was a renowned Marxist scholar, was himself a devotee of Senator Bernie Sanders as a young man. He now recognizes that the persistence of far-right ideology, with its masculinist and antidemocratic preoccupations, is part of the reason that neoliberalism has come undone. Not everyone, it seems, even wants a rising standard of living if it means they have to accept the greater enfranchisement of undesirables, including, of course, women, poor people, Black people, and the usual demons in the sights of the world’s Ted Cruzes and Tucker Carlsons.

The conceit that Buttigieg and a rising standard of living belong in the same sentence is yet another “only at Harvard” moment. When a man is responsible for the fact that even baby formula is in short supply, it takes willful blindness to say such a thing.

This, my friends, is what our media has come to. In the 1990s Nina Burleigh, a White House correspondent, famously announced her desire to give President Clinton a blow job in order to thank him for being an abortion activist.

Unfortunately for Heffernan, Buttigieg wouldn’t be interested in her apparent crush on the man. He doesn’t swing that way.

Besides, he is too busy using his cathedral of a mind reading, thinking about masculinity, and ruining the country.

Pete Buttigieg Takes Parental Leave Again After Adopting A Highway https://t.co/wB4mZbxs0s pic.twitter.com/hnoG1JHTc3

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 17, 2023