CIVIL WAR: Leftist Daily Beast Attacks Leftist Slate Over Piece on Buttigieg’s ‘Gayness’

A RussiaGate conspiracy theorist at The Daily Beast attacked fellow left-wing rag Slate for a recent piece that the latter published which questioned whether South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s “gayness” was diverse enough for progressives.

“After weeks of glowing press coverage of Pete Buttigieg as he’s shot up in the Democratic 2020 field, the ‘Pete’s Not Perfect’ posse has kicked into high gear with an unusually personal criticism: Buttigieg, they say, isn’t gay enough,” said John Aravosis in The Daily Beast. 

He roasted Slate, and other far left critics, for discounting Buttigieg’s presidential bid simply because Buttigieg is a white male. (Sorry John, these are the new rules, per your own party).

“Yet some liberal voices are now discounting Buttigieg’s sexual orientation (‘still a white man’),” he said, “or at least diminishing the historic discrimination gays have faced as compared with women and people of color (‘most of the time gender and race are way heavier burdens than sexual orientation in the professional and political environment,’ and ‘there was a time when it was illegal for us to marry interracially, women and POC could not even own property but a gay white man could’). For those critics, his race and gender negate the little credit they accord him for being gay.”

The social justice left has been showing signs of implosion recently, as the oppressed tribes into which it has divided itself ramp up their infighting.

Big League Politics reported on the original Slate piece:

As South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s star power rises in the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential field, left-wing blog Slate is asking the tough questions about the 37-year-old candidate.

“Is Pete Buttigieg Just Another White Male Candidate, or Does His Gayness Count as Diversity?” said a headline by Slate’s Christina Cauterucci.

While the political left races to the “progressive” bottom, the factions into which it has divided itself are now beginning to war against each other, as demonstrated by Slate’s piece.

“But with momentum comes backlash, currently in the form of frustration that the well-qualified female and black candidates in the race are getting shoved aside for another white guy,” the piece said.

Ultimately, the piece reached no conclusion about whether Buttigieg as a gay, white, male is more or less oppressed than any other group of “marginalized” Americans. Rather, Buttigieg was chided for not using his “gayness” to play the victim.

“But Buttigieg suggests that being gay has had ‘no bearing’ at all on anything else he’s done in his life,” the piece said. “There’s nothing objectively wrong with such an assimilationist perspective, especially for a newly out man who seems ready to lead on trans rights and other LGBTQ political issues. But it does makes him less exciting as the supposed gay trailblazer some on the left desperately want him to be.”

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