It’s not ‘homophobia’ to admit Pete Buttigieg got his job because he’s gay

An unfortunate symptom of a society that’s suffering from a serious case of identity politics is that people are celebrated simply for their membership to a particular, and usually immutable, identity group.

In a world that should value the virtues of each person outside of categories such as gender, race, and sexual orientation, we are instead witnessing the complete opposite. Today, these categories are all that matter.

OHIO TRAIN DERAILMENT: BIDEN ADMINISTRATION DEFLECTS BLAME FROM BUTTIGIEG IN LATEST BATTLE

Take Pete Buttigieg — our utterly incompetent secretary of transportation whose tenure has not only involved disaster after disaster but disasters of mammoth proportions. We’re talking about nationwide supply chain crises, planes grounded across the country because someone
deleted the wrong file
on the Federal Aviation Administration database, and a toxic cloud
spreading across
the Northeast and Midwest
poisoning the water supply
.

Now, Buttigieg also happens to be a homosexual man — something that, again, should not matter to any of us and certainly shouldn’t matter to his employer.

But it does matter to his employer and the entire Left. Some would say it’s all that matters because not only is Buttigieg’s career history sparse for the world of politics, but it’s hilariously devoid of anything to do with transportation.

After graduating from Harvard University and then Oxford University — where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics, the degree most British politicians take because it teaches you how to sound ever so smart without knowing anything — he was an intern at a local NBC News affiliate, a political campaign staffer, and a McKinsey & Company consultant, a title that remains meaningless to everyone who isn’t a consultant.

He was then elected as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in 2011 — a town of just over 100,000 people. He held this role until 2018, when he unsuccessfully campaigned to lead the Democratic National Committee, and then — because failing up is the career trajectory of every modern politician, apparently — he ran for president in 2020.

Notice something? None of these positions involved any form of expertise regarding transportation. In fact, his only transport-related job seems to have come in 2014 when he was deployed to Afghanistan as a member of the U.S. Navy Reserves, in which he referred to part of his role as an armed driver for his commander in naval intelligence as being a “military Uber.”

But despite this unquestionable lack of any relevant knowledge or experience, Buttigieg was selected by President Joe Biden as his secretary of transportation. And how did the media respond? With glee, of course!

“Pete Buttigieg becomes first openly gay Senate-confirmed Cabinet secretary,” gushed
USA Today
.
NPR
even went as far as to celebrate Buttigieg’s “personal love of transportation,” noting that he proposed to his husband in an airport terminal — at O’Hare Airport no less, the most idyllic of locales … if no maximum security prisons or public toilets are available. If you ask
the

Washington Post
, of course, “Pete Buttigieg is right. Airports are romantic.”

But you are simply not allowed to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

“Peter has no business in that position, but he’s the guy who had no business running for president,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a
now-viral video
. “But they let him do that because he was gay, and they check off a box, and then he didn’t win, but, well, he’s the gay guy, so, ‘We’ve got to give him something, let’s make him transportation secretary.’”

Now, unserious figures such as Aaron Rupar might clutch their pearls and declare that this is an example of “unvarnished homophobia,” but answer me this: Where’s the falsehood, and where’s the bigotry?

Let’s be honest. Buttigieg was chosen by Biden to be secretary of transportation because he’s gay and likes trains, much in the same way that Kamala Harris was chosen as his vice president because he promised to select a black woman, and Harris is, in fact, a black woman, or Karine Jean-Pierre was chosen as his press secretary because she’s black and a woman and gay — certainly not because she can
speak intelligently
(a rare talent in the White House these days).

It would, of course, be bigoted to criticize Buttigieg because he’s gay, criticize Harris because she’s a woman, or criticize Jean-Pierre because she’s black.

But there is nothing bigoted about pointing out that the incompetent clowns barely holding up the Biden administration were chosen solely because of these irrelevant identity groups. If they don’t want identity to matter, then perhaps they shouldn’t lead with “yay, he’s gay” as trains explode around us.

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Ian Haworth (
@ighaworth
) is the host of
Off Limits with Ian Haworth
.