Wired magazine used to tout itself as “the Rolling Stone of technology,” and like Rolling Stone, it enjoys publishing sticky valentines to leading Democrats. Conservatives are pointing and laughing at this profile by Virginia Heffernan, a Los Angeles Times columnist and Wired contributor:
Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang
Sure, the US secretary of transportation has thoughts on building bridges. But infrastructure occupies just a sliver of his voluminous mind.
This clearly invokes 2007-era Obama hagiography, minus the admiration for Barack’s “chiseled pectorals.” Liberal minds are so incredibly sharp and expansive! Even their photographs of Buttigieg are ponderous:
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.
With a remarkable blend of intellect and empathy, Pete Buttigieg brings a fresh perspective to the forefront of public discourse. https://t.co/mzbXgnvkSv
— WIRED (@WIRED) May 18, 2023
📷: Argus Paul Estabrook pic.twitter.com/KzI3qKrIA2
It’s then required to suggest Buttigieg is deeply religious:
Lefties these days are said to be less religious than right-wing evangelicals, but between Buttigieg, whose Episcopalianism grounds his decisionmaking, and his boss, President Joe Biden, whose robust Catholicism drives his sincere effort to revive America’s soul, perhaps a religious left is rising again.
Anyone touting the "robust Catholicism" and religious sincerity of President "Rosary in my Pocket" Biden is clearly a Democrat. Biden is robustly pro-abortion and devoutly pro-LGBTQ.
After a pile of denigrating remarks about Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson and the “androgen-addled, Putin-besotted ideologues” on the right, this question takes the religion cake:
HEFFERNAN: Running DOT seems to suit you. Are there more ways the challenges of transportation speak to your spiritual side?
BUTTIGIEG: There’s just a lot in the scriptural tradition around journeys, around roads, right? The conversion of Saint Paul happens on the road. I think we are all nearer to our spiritual potential when we’re on the move. Something about movement, something about travel pulls us out of the routines that numb us to who we are, to what we’re doing, to everything from our relationships with each other to our relationships with God....
Virginia Hefferman is paid by Wired, but she clearly earned a generous payout from Buttigieg in his persistent attempts to paint himself as Caucasian Obama.
