Via – The Daily Beast
The world is on fire. But for an increasingly vocal segment of extremely online politicos, there is a greater geopolitical concern hanging over the election: the fear that Pete Buttigieg is secretly an asset, officer, or agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The conspiracy theory that Buttigieg is a CIA plant has been congealing in the internet’s fever swamps for as long as profiles of the young candidate have fixated on a biography that, to the conspiracy-minded, seems almost suspiciously clean—the perceived threats of neoliberal imperialists and the “deep state” converging in the unlikely form of a dweebish Midwestern mayor.
“He’s one of the many intelligence community operators working in government,” Steve Poikonen, host of the YouTube vlog series Slow News Day, said confidently in an April episode titled “Pete Buttigieg: CIA Democrat?” In a 13-minute video delineating the conspiracy theory, Poikonen breaks down what he sees as Buttigieg’s Harvard-to-Oxford educational pipeline, his service as a Navy Intelligence officer in Afghanistan after a stint at McKinsey & Co., his fellowship at the Truman National Security Project, and the more than 200 national security and intelligence figures who have endorsed his candidacy, including the former head of the National Clandestine Service and the agency’s former deputy director.
These, Poikonen told The Daily Beast, all amount to evidence that he’s a perfect tool of the intelligence community.
“Put together, a picture forms of an elite-educated, multi-language-speaking employee of the CIA’s consulting firm who currently serves as an intelligence officer in the naval reserves,” Poikonen told The Daily Beast. “If you created a CIA asset in a lab, you’d wind up with Pete Buttigieg.”
Pointing to Buttigieg’s “mesmerizing, hypnotic blue eyes” as an obvious tell, Poikonen alleges that the candidate even confessed to having “botched” an interview with the intelligence agency during a 2017 interview on campaign strategist David Axelrod’s podcast, which, he says, is actually proof that he passed the interview. Such mental gymnastics are emblematic of the tinfoil-hat YouTube genre. (The Daily Beast reviewed the podcast in question and found no such confession; upon listening to the podcast again, Poikonen told The Daily Beast that “either I heard wrong, or it was edited. Both are possible.”)
But the theory, once restricted to the parts of the internet convinced that pop singer Katy Perry is actually child murder victim JonBenét Ramsey, has begun appearing in more mainstream channels. Left-wing political writers, podcasters and netizens are increasingly latching on to the meme that Buttigieg is a spy, an intelligence asset, or a Freemason to further the criticism that the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is not what he seems.
Last weekend, the popular campaign-themed podcast Worst Year Ever dropped an entire episode about Buttigieg under the lawyer-friendly title, “Is Pete Buttigieg a C.I.A. Agent?” Over the course of the 73-minute episode, hosts Robert Evans, Katy Stoll, and Cody Johnston vacillated between rundowns of more mainstream left-wing critiques of Buttigieg’s candidacy—his unpopularity among black voters, his popularity among Silicon Valley tech tycoons, the whole wine cave episode—and semi-humorous suppositions that Buttigieg is a CIA asset that grew less tongue-in-cheek as the episode went on.
“Conspiracy theory thinking is like a disease that is doing incalculable damage to the body politic, and like I hate jumping into stuff like that, but it’s so f***ing sketchy!” Evans exclaims at one point. “It’s so hard to not sound like—to not be, in fact—a conspiracy theorist when you talk about this guy, but there’s so much of it that screams f***ing spooks.”
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