Don’t fall for him. Pete Buttigieg is a total fraud.

When Pete Buttigieg first announced he was running for president in April 2019, I was open to his candidacy. I had been leaning towards supporting Bernie at the time and even though I never learned about any of Pete’s policy positions, I found out that he’s a mayor, gay, speaks many languages including Norwegian, served in the military, and once officiated a wedding at his mayoral office. He seemed like a nice guy to me. The media would not stop fawning over him and that in turn fooled me about what kind of person he truly is.

As months went by, his poor record in South Bend started to come out. Turns out that Mayor Pete had fired the first African American police chief after the city’s racist white police officers used Buttigieg’s donors to get it done. He also forced out the city’s first African American fire chief.

His horrible record on race doesn’t stop there. After the New Hampshire democratic debate, a South Bend councilman called out Buttigieg for tolerating and perpetuating systemic racism in South Bend and lying about it at the debate.

Watching him speak, you may get hypnotized by his flowery language and empty platitudes if you’re not paying attention to the actual substance of his words. He has repeatedly shown that he is willing to lie and use deceptive tricks to get ahead. According to the Wall street journal, Mayor Pete‘s military service is not as impressive as it seems. He used a shortcut called “direct commission in the reserves” which allowed him to avoid any actual training and instead just had to fill out paperwork, take a health exam and complete a background check. Here are some excerpts:

What normal human being does something like this? Only a psychopath who wants to build a false persona to tout when running for President, that’s who!

These are not the only instances of Buttigieg being deceptive or dishonest. In an attempt to increase his support among African Americans, he released his Douglas plan for black America while touting a list of 400 black leaders who endorsed his plan. Here’s the problem, 42% of the people on that list were white. In addition, Pete dishonestly claimed people had endorsed him when they didn’t. He claimed that they didn’t “opt-out” of the endorsement.

Some black leaders who never endorsed the plan were alarmed at being on Buttigieg’s list and one of them clearly stated that they are a strong Bernie supporter. On top of all that, Buttigieg’s campaign used a stock photo from Kenya to promote its Douglas plan

Everything about Pete’s campaign is meant to deceive people. Team Pete recently tweeted out an edited video clip of one his speeches and inserted artificial audience applause at the end. Have a listen:

Which leads up to the night of the Iowa caucus. Pete Buttigieg claimed victory before there were any results released from the caucus, which generated a bunch of undeserved positive media headlines. Now why would someone claim victory before the results, unless they knew something ahead of time?

In April 2019 around the time Pete announced his campaign, the New York Times reported that Pete Buttigieg attended a dinner hosted by a wealthy Democratic fundraiser along with Neera Tanden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. They were discussing how they could stop Bernie Sanders from winning the democratic nomination

We also found out that Buttigieg’s campaign paid $42,500 to Shadow for its services. Shadow Inc is the company that made the Iowa Caucus app. The parent company of Shadow is ACRONYM, a dark money non-profit organization that also has a Super-pac called PACRONYM.

Notably, the app was made by former Clinton staffers

Buttigieg’s national organizing director, Greta Carnes used to work for ACRONYM

The CEO of ACRONYM, Tara McGowan has a husband, Michael Halle that works for Buttigieg as a campaign strategist.

Now I’m not alleging that there was any conspiracy here or that the Buttigieg campaign helped rig the results in the Iowa caucus. But there are many clear conflicts of interest here and Buttigieg has not addressed any of it. When you combine that with the fact he prematurely declared victory, there is some clear red flags going off in my head. To further the conflict of interest, the Nevada Democratic party recently hired a former Buttigieg organizer as its “Voter Protection Director”

Going back to Pete Buttigieg as a person. What were his political opinions before he decided to run for President and take money from billionaires?

Well, back when Pete was a high school student in 2000, he wrote a prize winning essay praising Bernie Sanders. As the intercept reports,

In it, Buttigieg argued that American democracy is in crisis, thanks to the “troubling tendency towards cynicism among voters and elected officials” that is a product of “candidates … discover[ing] that [it] is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters.” Buttigieg criticized these unprincipled vacillations, rooted in officials’ never-ending quest to appear electable. Politicians are “rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues. … Just as film producers shoot different endings and let test audiences select the most pleasing, some candidates run ‘test platforms’ through sample groups to see which is most likely to win before they speak out on major issues.” Sanders, he said, is the exception to this trend. Sanders was then a member of the House of Representatives, and Buttigieg admired Sanders’s embrace of socialism at a time when communism was 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,” Buttigieg wrote. Many people have pointed out the irony that Buttigieg praised Sanders, when he is now running concertedly against the leftward pull that Sanders is helping effect in American politics. But if you read the essay closely, it comes off as less of an anomaly and more a reflection of the Mayor Pete we have come to know on the 2020 campaign trail.

As recently as 2017, Buttigieg gave a speech essentially defending the principles that Bernie stands on:

Nowadays, he attacks Bernie for using the socialist label. He has backed off from supporting Medicare for all, and continues to move further to the Center-right in his ideology. Most recently, he has begun adopting the right wing position of budget and deficit reduction.

So what was the point at which Buttigieg did a complete 180 degree turn on his ideology? Right around the time that his campaign started taking money from billionaire donors. Money has a corrupting influence on our politics. But it’s not just about that. Buttigieg has shown he is willing to be as dishonest as possible in order to try and win the nomination. He comes off as an android politician produced in a lab who has spent his years combing through Obama’s speeches and trying to imitate Obama’s speech patterns and eloquence without the substance to back it up. Flowery language and empty platitudes won’t bring the real change that America needs right now.

That’s why I support Bernie Sanders for President. He is the only politician who has been consistent and progressive throughout the decades. That’s why I’m calling on Nevada to caucus for Bernie on February 22nd.