Pete buttigieg

Wednesday

Caroline McCarthy

Silicon Valley loves Mayor Pete. He’s finished

If you spend a lot of time reading technology news and commentary on Twitter, you’ve probably heard about the ‘techlash’ – Silicon Valley’s alleged fall from favor in the public eye. From data breaches and Cambridge Analytica to the specter of job-stealing robots and an endless string of comparisons to Black Mirror, tech news has taken a turn for the dystopian. And public trust in these companies, especially Facebook, is legitimately dropping. But Silicon Valley’s media machine sometimes has a tendency to get caught up in its own hype, or in this case, its anti-hype. How real, and how lasting, is the ‘techlash?’ We may have a new litmus test in South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign for the presidency.

mayor pete silicon valley

Monday

Curt Mills

The Democrats are two parties on foreign policy

The media verdict is clear: the Democrats abhor President Trump’s foreign policy, and the Democrats aren’t really going to talk about it. ‘Democrats want to challenge Trump’s foreign policy in 2020. They’re still working out how,’ reports Vox. ‘Democrats are playing down foreign policy. It’s shrewd — and it may be a mistake,’ opines the Washington Post. ‘Why Aren’t Democratic Presidential Candidates Criticizing Trump’s Foreign Policy?’ wonders Reason magazine. And on it goes. Behind the scenes, however, it’s a frenzy, with the hiring of foreign policy advisers way up. For the Democrats, 2016 was a two-horse race, with a heavy front-runner in the familiar form of Hillary Clinton.

foreign policy tulsi gabbard
pete buttigieg time
Cockburn

Calling TIME: has Pete Buttigieg received the magazine’s kiss of death?

‘First Family’, declares the cover of this week’s TIME, as Mayor Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten gaze at the camera, dressed in blue jeans, brown belts and tucked-in button-downs. TIME has only been going since 1923 – a full 95 years younger than The Spectator – but in that time, it’s sought to position itself as something of a political Nostradamus. Hey, if you’ve got to fill the void between the TIME 100 and Person of the Year somehow, why not wildly guess who the next president will be? But how often do those tipped by the magazine rise to glory? Cockburn peered through the archives to discover...not frequently at all. Hillary Clinton has featured on several TIME covers in the past 30 years...

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Jacob Wohl’s latest hoax shows the issue with ‘believe all victims’

There’s a few fundamental problems with the idea of ‘believe all women,’ or more broadly, ‘believe all victims.’ The first is that our entire justice system is built upon the opposite idea, that people are in fact innocent until proven otherwise. The second is that as our definition of sexual assault keeps changing by the minute, it’s possible for two people to experience the same encounter in radically different ways, with one person believing they just had entirely consensual sex, and the other believing they were assaulted. The third, and most important: there are bad people in this world. And bad people lie.

jacob wohl

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The genesis of the #NeverBernie movement

Is a #NeverBernie faction starting to emerge among Democrats? Sanders is on a roll after his appearance at a town hall meeting on Fox News where he garnered the applause of many in the audience and attracted several million viewers. He attacked Trump as a ‘pathological liar’ and defended his sweeping healthcare — BernieCare? — plan. After Bret Baier asked how many in the audience were willing to trade in their current plans for Medicare for All, a majority raised their hands, much to his surprise. President Trump was clearly irked by Sanders’s successful foray into hostile territory, tweeting “So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @FoxNews. Not surprisingly, @BretBaier and the “audience” was so smiley and nice.

bernie sanders neverbernie #neverbernie
chasten buttigieg
Chadwick Moore

Step aside, First Ladies: it’s Chasten Buttigieg’s time to shine

Jackie Kennedy oversaw a restoration of the White House and transformed the First Residence into a museum of American art and history. She also arranged for the Mona Lisa to tour America (a move that caused riots in Paris). Betty Ford, candid about her struggle with drugs and alcohol, established the nation’s preeminent addiction treatment center. Rosalynn Carter attended cabinet meetings and was the president’s emissary to Latin America and Melania Trump is a paragon of grace, elegance and style for American women to admire. But it’s time to step aside, First Ladies, because there’s a big, goofy, gay nerd coming through and his name is Chasten Buttigieg.

Sunday

Cameron Hendy

Notes from the Gravelanche

Let’s be honest – the best part of primary season is seeing just how wild some of the fringe candidates are. Every election cycle throws up a few quixotic single-issue mavericks without a hope in hell of actually securing the nomination. Such campaigns are usually admirable attempts to force concessions from more viable contenders or shift the debate on some key issue or another – standard politicking. Somewhat more unorthodox is the campaign of Mike Gravel – the ex-politician who doesn’t want anyone to vote for him at all. Mike Gravel, former congressman and senator from Alaska has been politically reincarnated by David Oks, a high-school senior who is now serving as his campaign manager.

mike gravel 2020 gravelanche

Wednesday

Edward Condon

Pastor Pete and the politics of religion

Religious faith may be declining in America but it is still a cultural force to be reckoned with, looming large in any general election cycle. Courting religious voters remains a factor in the calculus of any prospective presidential candidate, especially as neither party seems a natural home for many of them. Americans are actually losing their religion rather faster than their faith. A recent poll showed that ‘nones’ – those without a religious affiliation –  are now the country’s largest group for the first time: Americans are increasingly defining their own faith, and not asking a church to do it for them. In this landscape, what a ‘Christian’ believes as a core value is suddenly malleable and open to influences from all sides.

pete buttigieg