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Tucker Carlson Attacks Sec. Pete Buttigieg for ‘Lying’ About Being Gay

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is all kinds of upset with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, attacking him Wednesday night, claiming that Buttigieg “hid” and “lied” about his sexual orientation “for reasons he has never been asked to explain.”

Buttigieg came out quite publicly as gay in 2015, while he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana, writing about this in an article [1] for the South Bend Tribune, Mediaite [2] reports. Having joined the military in 2009, Buttigieg later wrote about the stress he dealt with because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” He was in the reserves at the time and this policy, which fortunately ended in 2011, [3] prohibited military personnel from being openly gay.

Carlson was mid-rant about the response to the mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where five people were killed and dozens more wounded when he decided to upbraid Buttigieg.

“Pete Buttigieg, of course, couldn’t pass up a moment like this,” Carlson said. “It’s not like Pete Buttigieg wants to talk about how things are going over at the Transportation Department, which he supposedly runs. Short answer not well.”

But that’s not all the Fox News anchor had to say.

“No, Pete Buttigieg wants to talk about identity. He always wants to talk about identity. And the funny, ironic thing is, that until just a few years ago, Buttigieg wouldn’t even admit that he was gay. He hid that and then lied about it for reasons he has never been asked to explain. Why not?

“But whatever. Now he is happy to use his sexual orientation as a cudgel to bash you repeatedly in the face into submission,” Carlson continued. “Quote, here’s his latest, ‘If you’re a politician or media figure who sets up the LGBTQ community to be hated and feared, not because hany of us who ever harmed you — but because you find it useful — then don’t you dare act surprised when this kind of violence follows.”

So of course Carlson had to mock Buttigieg, in a sing-song voice.

“Don’t you dare act surprised. Don’t you dare,” he said.

“All right, fair enough. We won’t dare. But honestly, we’re a little surprised to learn that the anti-trans shooter is himself trans. (Which is flat-out wrong. Anderson Lee Aldrich, the alleged shooter is non-binary. [5]) Were you surprised by that, Pete Buttigieg?”

“Buttigieg,now that you’re admitting you’re gay after lying about it, since we’re talking about identity

However, Buttigieg wrote about waiting to come out when he was in his thirties, noting “I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay. It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am.”

In an article for Medium, [6] Buttigieg, writing about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” noted “For individual service members, that meant hiding who they were from the people they trusted with their lives. In some cases it meant living a life that was less than whole.”

“For partners, it meant that when a promotion came up, they wouldn’t be there to celebrate a new rank being pinned on. And should the worst happen, they wouldn’t even be contacted,” he said, adding that in his case, it meant at this time in his life, while being deployed, “I could die without ever having known what it felt like to be in love.”

But the sad thing here is that while Carlson is attacking Buttigieg for supposedly lying, Carlson, himself lies frequently or just plain gets things wrong. All you have to do is check out this recent [7] fact check by Politifact and you’ll find out. The site lists numerous comments the Fox News host has made that were either rated False, Mostly, False, or Pants On Fire.

Isn’t he a fine one to talk? I’ve heard it said that a jerk doesn’t know when he’s being a jerk and I think that fits here.