On Tuesday, at a campaign stop in South Carolina, South Bend, Indiana, mayor and current Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg called Trump supporters soft on racism, implying that some may be worse than that, asserting, “Anyone who supported this President is at best looking the other way on racism, at best.”
Here's Pete Buttigieg today accusing nearly 63 million Trump voters of being racist
"Anyone who supported this President is at best looking the other way on racism, at best." pic.twitter.com/Fo9ZibOkSO
— Zach Parkinson (@AZachParkinson) December 3, 2019
Buttigieg’s appeal to racial minorities has been a seeming obsession with him lately; on Sunday he nodded in agreement as leftist reverend William Barber suggested that migrants who were illegally entering the United States were reclaiming land that the United States stole from Mexico. As The Daily Wire reported, Barber asked, “Do you think we need to also stop allowing forces to demonize ‘people who are trying to get their immigration status’ and we start lifting up all the ways they benefit this country?”
Buttigieg responded, “Yeah, I mean the uncomfortable reality is that undocumented folks are in many ways, like Social Security, subsidizing everybody else.”
Barber theorized as Buttigieg nodded in agreement, “And we need to talk about that – and shouldn’t we have some conversation whenever people say, we call people ‘illegal aliens’ and all these things that are not human, are certainly not Christian. Why can’t we just own in America that some of the people that are trying to come from Mexico here are coming back to land we stole, and the reason we took the land is because people wanted to keep their slaves?”
Pete Buttigieg with a valiant effort to take the lead in the “woke olympics.”
Buttigieg nods along in agreement with the claim that illegal immigrants are reclaiming stolen land in US.pic.twitter.com/iLHsMIvyBw
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 1, 2019
Buttigieg has been trying desperately to gain a foothold in the America’s black community since reports surfaced in mid-November that indicated Buttigieg falsely claimed to have endorsements for his plan to reach out to the black community, used a stock photo from Africa to depict African-Americans, and falsely claimed that the plan had support from hundreds of black voters who were actually white. Buttigieg’s campaign had started promoting a list of 400 black South Carolina voters that it claimed supported his plan, but it turned out that nearly half of the list was white.
The New York Times reported on November 21:
Mr. Buttigieg has failed to demonstrate even minimal support among African-Americans and Hispanics, critical voting blocs that will have a much larger say after Iowa and New Hampshire, and their nearly all-white electorates, begin the presidential nominating calendar. … Mr. Buttigieg’s weakness with voters of color — he registered zero percent among black South Carolina Democrats in a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday — limits his potential in the 2020 campaign.
Politico added:
Unlike in Iowa and in New Hampshire — predominately white states where Buttigieg has been bunched with Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in recent polls — Buttigieg lags behind them in South Carolina. Biden’s dominance here is due in part to his strong support among African Americans, pulling in 44 percent support from them in a Quinnipiac University poll released late last month. Meanwhile, Buttigieg registered at less than 1 percent support among African American primary voters.
Mother Jones reported last July, “When Buttigieg became mayor in 2012, there were 29 black police officers in South Bend. By 2019, that number had dwindled to 15. Mayor Pete has presided over a police department that’s been roiled by internal tension and has been at odds with the black community. More to the point: He’s done little to resolve it.”