Pete Buttigieg, Come On Down!

Pete Buttigieg, Come On Down!

These are extraordinary times. And extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures—out-of-the-box measures.

One of the most extraordinary things happening right now is just how successful the MAGA administration has been at controlling information—spreading lies, withholding facts, and now, outright banning news organizations that refuse to fall in line. Just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary. Just like autocrats always do. What I can’t understand is why all legitimate news organizations, both foreign and domestic, don’t stop showing up until the AP is let back into the pool? Do they not realize that it will happen to them all unless they stop being legitimate news organizations? That now is the only time to stop it. En masse. Collaboratively, collectively?

I live in Maine. Yesterday, I was in the truck with a man who works for me in the summers—helps in the garden, around the house. We’ve talked politics before. He was going to vote for Trump, even after his mother and wife begged him not to. His reasons weren’t informed, and I gave him things to read, but at the core, he simply doesn’t trust politics or politicians. And like so many others, there was something in Trump’s nonsense that pulled him in.

In the end, he said he didn’t vote. And he and his wife don’t talk about politics anymore.

Yesterday, I asked him how he thought things were going. His answer stunned me.

    “Well, I’m really happy. He’s finally doing an audit of everything in the government to get rid of waste.”

I tried to stay calm. I asked where he heard that, because I know he doesn’t watch TV or read newspapers.

    “Facebook.”

All lies. None of it’s real. Meanwhile, real things are happening that will hurt him—including the fact that our electricity comes from Canada, and Trump’s tariffs could raise rates by 25%. But I don’t know what he thinks now.

I do know that his information is part of the problem.

The Left’s Communication Problem

This brings me to the point:

The way we are streaming information from the left is ineffective at best, damaging at worst. It has to change.

The most effective communicator in the Democratic Party is Pete Buttigieg. That’s not a question. He is. Even on Fox News, he is.

We are living in an information vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. If we don’t fill it, MAGA will.

A Radical Communication Strategy

Pete Buttigieg needs to be hired by the Democratic Party as its Press Secretary for Truth. Call it “American News.”

Every day, he holds a press conference on Capitol Hill—because he now works for Democrats there—and delivers, in Heather Cox Richardson fashion, five to ten talking points with the truth about what’s happening.

We, as Americans, demand that his briefings get the same airtime as MAGA’s. And if Trump’s thugs threaten the press—if you air Buttigieg, you lose access to us—so be it. Let them say it out loud.

Then, each of the five to ten points is immediately cut into shorts on YouTube. The other social media channels are already cutting out our feeds and shutting down posts. It should move to YouTube and BlueSky (and so should all of us by the way).

Did you know YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world?

We start there.

Then, we flood the gates. We share those shorts across every platform. TikTok. Instagram. Facebook.

More imporantly, we text message them to those who will care about that particular topic. We get the truth out the way they get lies out: everywhere, all the time, until people start to believe it.

Because here’s the thing:

What we’ve been doing for the last 30 years hasn’t worked.

Not for a minute. Not for a second.

So let’s try something else.

All in favor? Tell someone else.