Tucker Carlson railed against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg during Wednesday night’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
The Fox News opinion host brought up Buttigieg while discussing the recent mass shooting in Colorado Springs at LGBTQ destination Club Q – an event that resulted in five deaths and 18 injuries.
Carlson felt that Buttigieg’s response to the tragedy, in which he framed partisan media personalities like Carlson as culpable to the intensifying physical violence against the LGBTQ community, was hypocritical.
“Pete Buttigieg, of course, couldn’t pass up a moment like this. It’s not like Pete Buttigieg wants to talk about how things are going over at the Transportation Department, which he supposedly runs, short answer, not well,” Carlson said. “Pete Buttigieg wants to talk about identity. He always wants to talk about identity. And the funny, ironic thing is that until just a few years ago, Buttigieg wouldn’t even admit that he was gay.”
Carlson claimed that Buttigieg “hid” his sexual orientation while serving in the military — he served as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve from 2009 to 2017 — and built his political career and “then lied about it for reasons he has never been asked to explain.”
“Why not?” Carlson questioned. “But whatever. Now he is happy to use his sexual orientation as a cudgel to bash you repeatedly in the face into submission.”
In a Monday tweet responding to the shooting, Buttigieg wrote: “If you’re a politician or media figure who sets up the LGBTQ community to be hated and feared, not because any of us who ever harmed you, but because you find it useful that don’t you dare act surprised when this kind of violence follows.”
“Don’t you dare act surprised. Don’t you dare,” Carlson mocked. “All right, fair enough. We won’t dare.
“But honestly, we’re a little surprised to learn that the anti-trans shooter is himself trans. Were you surprised by that Pete Buttigieg?” Carlson questioned, misgendering the shooter, Anderson Aldrich.
He went on to say that Buttigieg “hasn’t said anything” about the shooter’s identity “nor has he apologized for attacking other people on false pretenses.”
Buttigieg, who joined the military in 2009, publicly came out as gay while serving as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana in 2015. He wrote about why coming out matters in an article in his local paper.
“I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay,” he acknowledged. “It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am.”
He later wrote about the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in a Medium blog post in 2019. The policy, which ended in 2011, prohibited military personnel from being openly gay.
“For individual servicemembers, that meant hiding who they were from the people they trusted with their lives. In some cases it meant giving a life that was less than whole,” he explained. “For partners, it meant that when a promotion came up, they wouldn’t be there to celebrate a new rank being pinned on. And should the worst happen, they wouldn’t even be contacted.”
Buttigieg said that he wrote a letter while on deployment in Afghanistan to his family in the event that he didn’t come home.
“Writing it had required as much of me as the hardest day of training,” he said. “What I didn’t put in the letter was that the act of writing it forced me to reflect on the possibility that I could die without ever having known what it felt like to be in love.”
Watch Carlson’s Fox News segment in the video above.
