South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign explained to Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the Democratic presidential candidate flies commercially as much as possible, unless his schedule dictates otherwise.
Carlson characterized Buttigieg as a hypocritical moralizer during his Thursday night show, playing a clip of Buttigieg claiming during CNN’s climate town hall that God is displeased with mankind because of pollution. “If you believe that God is watching as poison is being belched into the air of creation, and people are being harmed by it — countries are at risk of vanishing in low-lying areas — what do you suppose God thinks of that?” Buttigieg asked the audience. “I bet he thinks it’s messed up,” he added, before going on to characterize pollution as “a kind of sin.”
Carlson went on to sarcastically wonder what torments await in “Father Pete’s Episcopalian version of hell,” in which he “[lectures] you superciliously for eternity, wagging his little fingers in your face, bragging about his virtue. It’s enough to make you want to obey.”
Buttigieg, however, only follows his own commandments “when it’s convenient,” Carlson said. “Father Pete, though, fears no such judgment, because at the very same time he is lecturing you about ‘belching poison into the air of creation,’ Father Pete himself is likely to be sipping Perrier at 50,000 feet in a leased Gulf Stream.”
“According to an Associated Press report,” Carlson said, “Buttigieg flies on climate-destroying private jets more than any other Democratic candidate in the race right now. How can that be? We asked the Buttigieg campaign that question today and they responded.” Carlson then read the campaign’s explanation that “we fly commercial as often as possible, and only fly non-commercial when the schedule dictates.”
Buttigieg has adopted Christian terminology often in his presidential campaign, and has denounced with biblical fervor what he characterizes as the hypocrisy of Republican evangelicals. He tore into “so-called conservative Christian senators” during the first Democratic primary debate, and chided them by quoting a Bible verse. He predicted ominously on Thursday that Republican Christians would face “a reckoning.“
Buttigieg’s brother-in-law, evangelical pastor Rhyan Glezman, accused the presidential candidate of hijacking his family’s story and mischaracterizing what Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, endured growing up. Glezman told the Washington Examiner that he believes “as a Christian, we’re the people being shunned, people being silenced, and a lot of the liberal side of things are becoming the bigots to Christianity and faith. They are becoming the intolerant side.”
