Pete Buttigieg: the difference between being smart and seeming smart

WIRED performs journalistic fellatio on Biden’s most useless cabinet member, who has everyone fooled

Look, the media love Democrats, we get it.

But with WIRED Magazine’s profile and interview of U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, we’ve moved on from mild and vaguely subtle coastal-elite-adoration to full-blown and shameless journalistic oral sex.

“Sure, the US secretary of transportation has thoughts on building bridges,” Virginia Heffernan writes in the subtitle. “But infrastructure occupies just a sliver of his voluminous mind.”

Barf.

Every sentence of this absurd profile reads like the inner musings of a pseudo-intellectual teenager enamored with a supposedly oh-so-clever college student.

Hands off, Virginia. He’s taken.

Here are just a few ridiculous highlights.

• “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.”

• “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.”

Again, barf.

But one thing stood out to me among the sycophantic questioning and almost literal ass-kissing that made up the bulk of this laughable article: the idea that Pete Buttigieg is smart.

“[A]s a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he got a first in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), the trademark degree for Labour-party elites of the Tony Blair era,” Heffernan says.

Labour-party elites…such as David Cameron, William Hague, Philip Hammond, Michael Heseltine, Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Ann Widdecombe and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak…all members of the British Conservative Party.

Who cares about research, huh?

But as a fellow graduate of Oxford University, I want to let you in on a little secret:

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) is the Oxford degree for people who want to learn how to seem far smarter than they are.