Democratic former President Joe Biden's Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, made a very well-received appearance on so-called manosphere podcast Flagrant on Wednesday.
In response to the praise heaped on the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, by young male Trump voters, Fox News decided to attack Buttigieg's masculinity.
Fox News hosts Rachel Campos-Duffy, wife of Republican President Donald Trump's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Raymond Arroyo spent Thursday evening attempting to degrade the former naval intelligence officer who spent six-months deployed in Afghanistan.
Arroyo, a producer from Christian broadcasting channel EWTN, said:
"Mayor Pete is not exactly the one you send out to get the young bro crowd."
"You may as well send [trans influencer] Dylan Mulvaney doing a makeup class and hope you can get more guys."
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As the screen showed the chyron "Mayor Pete: Dems are finger waggers," Campos-Duffy said:
"He’s clearly gotten the masculinity problem memo."
You can see a clip here:
Campos-Duffy, who gained fame as a hard-partying MTV Real World San Francisco cast member before rebranding as a Christian nationalist "trad wife," then borrowed language from the "Alpha male" movement dominated by men like indicted sex trafficker and serial sexual assaulter Andrew Tate.
Campos-Duffy added:
"He’s pretending not to be a beta. He grew a beard and he hit the manosphere, the male podcast world."
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A clip of Buttigieg from the Flagrant podcast was shown on Fox, during which he criticized members of his own Democratic Party for "finger wagging."
After it finished, Campos-Duffy snarked:
"Isn’t Pete the worst virtue-signaling winger fagger?"
After smirking and taking a beat, Campos-Duffy quipped:
"Wagger."
Fox News claimed it was an inadvertent slip of Campos-Duffy's tongue, but Fox fans got her message loud and clear.
People had two main theories for why Fox News decided to lean into homophobia and toxic masculinity to denigrate Buttigieg.
First, the powers that be saw the overwhelmingly positive response to Buttigieg's Flagrant sit down.
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Others felt Fox News was upset by being mentioned during the Flagrant interview.
During the Biden presidency, Transportation Secretary Buttigieg often went into the lion's den of Fox News on behalf of the Biden administration and always emerged unscathed if not outright victorious.
During his podcast appearance, Buttigieg said:
"Like it’s all well and good for me to keep going on Fox News, and I will. Although they don’t seem to be inviting me as much lately."
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Regardless of the network's motivations, people found the segment puerile and churlish.
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Some people had critiques for the Fox hosts' own appearance after they mocked Buttigieg's.
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Others suggested it was time for Fox News to take a financial dive like Tesla.
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Buttigieg addressed his reasons for appearing on Flagrant via his Substack.
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