The word is finally starting to get out about Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the fresh faced, suddenly “surging” Democrat presidential contender who is poised to do well in Tuesday’s first in the nation New Hampshire primary. Just as I suspected, however, first impressions can be deceiving: Mayor Pete is in effect morphing into Obama 2.0 – another questionable cut-out figure posing as a moderate who in reality is a socialist at best and most likely a full-blown Marxist communist sympathizer.

Much is made of Buttigieg’s initial claim to fame, exactly 20 years ago when he was a high school senior in South Bend, Indiana. His essay was selected as the best one out of 600 to be submitted in 2000 to the annual prestigious John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage essay contest sponsored by the JFK Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Few MSM reports, however, have noted the subject or content of the young Buttigieg’s 1,100-word essay. The title says it all: “Bernie Sanders.” Sanders, it turns out, was Buttigieg’s favorite political profile in courage.

In 2000, Bernie Sanders was in his fifth term as the sole member of the House of Representatives from the state of Vermont. He was an obscure backbencher who identified himself as an “Independent” and a “Socialist.” According to the Washington Post, Sanders was the fifth socialist to serve in the House, the last one having left in 1929. In 2007, Sanders would be elected to the United States Senate and after another eight years on the sidelines, the rest, as they say, is history.

Caroline Kennedy and Peter Buttigieg at the JFK Library and Museum essay award ceremony, May 22, 2000 Source: jfklibrary.org

In his award-winning essay, Buttigieg swoons over his hero Rep. Sanders, writing:

Sanders’ courage is evident in the first word he uses to describe himself: “Socialist”. In a country where Communism is still the dirtiest of ideological dirty words, in a climate where even liberalism is considered radical, and Socialism is immediately and perhaps willfully confused with Communism, a politician dares to call himself a socialist? He does indeed. Here is someone who has “looked into his own soul” and expressed an ideology, the endorsement of which, in today’s political atmosphere, is analogous to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Even though he has lived through a time in which an admitted socialist could not act in a film, let alone hold a Congressional seat, Sanders is not afraid to be candid about his political persuasion.

A decade and a half before Sanders would inspire a generation of young leftists to action with his clarion call for free stuff and a top-down transformation of the United States away from free market capitalism, Buttigieg concluded his essay:

I commend Bernie Sanders for giving me an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption. I have heard that no sensible young person today would want to give his or her life to public service. I can personally assure you this is untrue.

The nine-member committee that judged the entries and selected Buttigieg as the winner included JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy; JFK’s brother Sen. Ted Kennedy; Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund; Antonia Hernandez, President of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; and several high level MSM executives. Along with a $3,000 prize, Buttigieg and his parents were feted at a lavish event in Boston where they got to hob nob with the East coast progressive elite.

Speaking of Buttigieg’s parents: It has recently come to wider attention, thanks to the new media and social media, that Buttigieg’s father Joseph, who passed away last year, was a leading Marxist academic. The Washington Examiner actually broke this story last April, but it was largely ignored, probably because back then Pete Buttigieg, an unknown mayor of a small rust belt city with a minimal political resume, was considered an asterisk in this year’s race for the Democrat nomination – until recently, that is, after his strong showing in last Monday’s Iowa Caucus. And the desire of Democrat bigwigs to anoint someone to stop the equally surging but harder to swallow full-throated socialist Bernie Sanders.

The elder Buttigieg, according to Emily Larsen and Joseph Simonson writing in the Examiner:

was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin. Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January [2019] at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel’s more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.

Pete Buttigieg, his late father Joseph, and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci

Source: JrinTheUSA Twitter

The parallels here with Barack Hussein Obama are striking. At his high-profile launch in July 2004 when he delivered the keynote speech at the Democrat National Convention in Boston that nominated John Kerry and for the next four years, Obama presented himself as a moderate. In 2007-’08, he ran to the right – relatively speaking – of Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination. While a handful of reporters and commentators tried to bring Obama’s extreme radical left background to wider attention, his previous career, writings, and associations were completely whitewashed and largely ignored by the mainstream. It wasn’t until he assumed office and ruled for eight years that his promise to “transform” America would start to be appreciated for what it was.

A number of mainstream talking head pundits are already making what they see as favorable comparisons between Obama and Buttigieg. Both of them boast an Ivy League pedigree, they are (or were, in the case of Obama) young and appealing figures, and they are smooth, glib talkers. Buttigieg is currently getting the buzz, as well, because the leftist power brokers clearly see someone like him as more electable than the aging, dour, in-your-face socialist Sanders. Waiting in the wings, meanwhile, is multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg. The former New York City mayor, however, who is prepared to self-fund his campaign to the tune of $2 billion, carries a lot of baggage if he’s to be the one to stop Sanders and beat Donald Trump. Buttigieg – who Forbes last June estimated has a net worth of only $100,000 – would more likely be much easier for leftist Democrats, and many independent and even Republican voters, to swallow.

With all of this disturbing information now coming to light, the question today should be: Is Pete Buttigieg, like Obama, another wolf in sheep’s clothing? The increasingly strong possibility, I think it is safe to say, is YES.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran journalist who writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Peter's website is http://peter.media. His new YouTube channel is here. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.