Pete Buttigieg, the former Biden Transportation Secretary, has pulled a stunning about-face, trashing the Democrats’ sacred cow of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs during a Thursday forum titled “The Future of the Democratic Party.” Once a darling of the progressive elite, Buttigieg now admits the party’s obsession with forced diversity has backfired—big time. For conservatives, this isn’t a revelation; it’s a victory lap, proving President Donald Trump was right to slam these bloated, ineffective policies that have plagued workplaces and cost taxpayers dearly.
Buttigieg didn’t pull punches when he mocked DEI training seminars.
“What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for? Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of ‘Portlandia,’ which I have also experienced,” he said.
He aired this at a Chicago event moderated by David Axelrod, who’d just ripped the DNC chair election as a “spectacle” of identity politics run amok. Buttigieg’s jab at “Portlandia”—a show skewering liberal absurdities—lands like a sledgehammer, especially since he once championed similar nonsense as South Bend mayor.
The hypocrisy stinks worse than a week-old landfill. Back in 2019, Buttigieg’s administration rolled out diversity training for cops, complete with slides decrying “sizeism” and other “isms”—all while violent crime surged 22% from 2014 to 2019, per FBI stats. Homicides hit 12 in 2017, a five-year high under his watch. Instead of cracking down, he had police sitting through lectures on “microaggressions.” Now he’s acting like he’s seen the light—convenient timing with whispers of a 2026 Michigan Senate run against GOP titan Mike Rogers.
Axelrod set the stage, railing against the DNC’s obsession with “caucuses” for every niche group.
“What we did was fine—we just have to communicate it better,” he sarcastically quipped, before asking how Democrats avoid looking like a “caricature.”
Buttigieg piled on, saying, “If that comes to your workplace with the best of intentions but doesn’t actually get at what we’re doing, what actually matters here, what’s actually at stake.” He slammed the party’s fixation on “vocabularies” and “combinations of identities” over a “shared project,” hinting it’s alienated white men—educated or not—a bloc the GOP’s been winning back since Trump’s 2016 landslide.
Trump’s been torching DEI for years, calling it a woke scam that wastes money and kills merit. His administration’s already axing it—SpaceX engineers are gutting the FAA’s outdated systems, not sitting through “sensitivity” classes. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blasted Buttigieg last week, accusing him of turning the DOT into a “slush fund for the green new scam and environmental justice nonsense” while 90% of his team—including Pete—worked from home. Duffy’s fixing the air traffic mess Buttigieg ignored, proving GOP action trumps Democrat platitudes.
Buttigieg’s flip-flop reeks of political survival. The left’s howling—he’s been tied to the CIA and centrist sellouts before—but now he’s tossing their DEI dogma under the bus to chase broader appeal. Too late. Republicans have the receipts: he pushed this garbage when it suited him, and now Trump’s team is dismantling it. The Democrat Party’s imploding under its own weight, and conservatives are ready to bury their failed experiments with real solutions—less talk, more results.
