Pete Buttigieg, current mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and rising star for Democrats, has garnered a lot of media attention in the last few weeks. Though he’s been a local favorite in South Bend for some years, Buttigieg got national attention after he (among other things) criticized Vice President Mike Pence during a live CNN Town Hall. That national attention resulted in $600,000 in donations in just 24 hours, which is nothing to dismiss. When speaking to Jake Tapper, Buttigieg said that Pence is a “cheerleader for the porn star presidency,” a one-liner that rocketed him into the public sphere.
Now, Buttigieg has the opportunity to talk about his policy ideas more broadly. He wants to restructure the Supreme Court, supports a guaranteed income, and wants to grant explicit protections to LGBTQ Americans. Great!
For some reason, people really want to know what he thinks about boycotting Chick-fil-A. Yes, the fast food chain. How did we get here?
On The Breakfast Club, (the same radio show where Kamala Harris reminisced about smoking weed in college), Buttigieg, who is openly gay, said he’d be a “peacemaker” of sorts between the LGBTQ community and Chick-fil-A.
"I do not approve of their politics,” he explained on the radio show, “but I kind of approve of their chicken.”
For some background, Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy said that the company supports “the biblical definition of the family unit” in 2012. There are also allegations that the company has donated to explicitly anti-LGBTQ causes. As a result, many people boycott the company by either not spending money there or through word of mouth.
The boycott logic being: Why give money to a company that, in turn, gives it to anti-LGBTQ organizations? Instead, you could spend your dollars supporting LGBTQ-owned or otherwise friendly businesses.
On Wednesday morning, Buttigieg did an interview with BuzzFeed News’s AM to DM. He elaborated on these fried-chicken-focused ethical dilemmas, saying:
“I just want to make sure we don’t overrate ourselves in terms of our ability to be pure in this regard. … If you’re turned off, as I am, by the political behavior of Chick-fil-A or their executives—if that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, so to speak, and you decide not to shop there, I’d certainly get it and I’d support that. But the reality is, we, I think, sometimes slip into a sort of virtue signaling in some cases where we’re not really being consistent. I mean, what about all the other places we get our chicken from?”
While pretty silly on the surface, all of this is seemingly an attempt to show that, if president, he’d use his skills to bring people together despite their differences. It also feels like a comment on “call out” culture, where some worry that social media trends or “hot takes” dictate decisions in one example, but don’t translate to larger change.
As of now, Buttigieg has not officially declared his candidacy but has formed an exploratory committee.
Here is the full interview from the Breakfast of Club: