This Is How They Pick Us Off

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This weekend, someone with hate in their heart picked up a phone, called Child Protective Services, and falsely reported that Pete Buttigieg was abusing his four-year-old twins.

It was a lie. A complete fabrication, built on a story about some woman who supposedly met Pete at a conference in Alabama — a town he has never set foot in. But that’s all it takes. The call triggered a process. CPS and the police showed up at his home in Michigan. His kids were sent to their grandparents’. Pete was told he could not be alone with his own children until they’d been interviewed by strangers. For twenty-four hours, this family had no idea what he was even accused of. This wasn't just an attack on Pete Buttigieg. It was an attempt to make public service hurt. That's the point.

Twenty-four hours. He called it among the darkest of his life. And as a father, I believe him — because I’ve been sitting in my own rage about this for two days, and they’re not even my kids.

Here’s what you need to understand about Pete Buttigieg. The man is calm. He is level-headed to a fault — the kind of person who keeps his voice even when everyone around him is losing it. So when *that* guy tells you about the rage and the sadness he felt, when *that* guy says someone “dragged our children into this,” you should feel your stomach turn. Because it takes a lot to rattle Pete Buttigieg, and somebody found the one thing that would do it. They did it on purpose. They did it during Pride Month, right after he posted photos of his family for Father’s Day. That’s not an accident.

There are about ten different rants in me right now. How we protect LGBTQ parents from this kind of targeted cruelty. How the disgusting anti-Pride rhetoric coming out of the MAGA movement this month is a permission slip for exactly for cruelty like this. All of it is worth writing. But I want to talk about the part that scares me most, because it’s the quiet part nobody says out loud.

This is how they pick us off.

Good people — talented people, people who actually have something to give to their community, their city, their country — these are the people who watch what happened to Pete and decide it’s not worth it. I said the same thing when Melissa Hortman was assassinated in her own home in Minnesota last year. Every time one of these things happens, somewhere out there a good person who was *this close* to running for school board, for city council, for the state house, quietly decides to sit it out. Who could blame them?

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I’ll be honest with you. When I told my wife I wanted to write about this — that I wanted to get into it with my buddy Adam Mockler on our Saturday show — she asked me not to. She didn’t want something like this to come for us, for our son, for our family. And you know what? That’s not paranoia. That’s a completely legitimate fear. I sat with it. I almost didn’t write this, because writing it elevates it, and elevating it is what these people want.

But here’s the thing about me: when I feel that fear, I tend to steer into the skid. I know not everybody is built that way, and I will *always* tell people to do what’s right for them and their family first. No rant is worth your kid.

But understand what’s happening if we all flinch at once.

You ever wonder why it feels like our politics is overrun with psychopaths and grifters and losers? It’s not an accident. It is an intentional process of selection. Every assassination, every threat, every swatting, every bogus CPS report quietly filters out another decent person. There is an entire class of people who feel no shame, who don’t care who they hurt, who aren’t trying to *accomplish* anything — and those people are not scared off by any of this. They’re falling over themselves to run. They’ll bend every rule, break every law, abuse every campaign finance loophole, go on TV and say the most vile thing they can think of, because cruelty is the product. That’s how you get Trump. That’s how you get all of them. And every time a decent person decides it’s too dangerous to step up, the field gets handed a little more completely to the worst people in America.

I don’t want these people to win.

Whether it's Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota elected member of Congress murdered in cold blood in her own home; or Alex Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old ICU nurse, gunned down by federal agents as he stood in the street recording them and trying to help a woman they'd knocked down; or someone trying to take Pete Buttigieg's children from him over a lie, the objective is the same: they want you to hesitate. They want you scared to show up to a No Kings protest. Scared to pull out your phone and record ICE. Scared to put your name on a ballot. That's the point. We cannot accept this.

We cannot hand this country over to people who do not care about the rest of us, who aren’t interested in building anything, who only know how to burn it down. When we withdraw, when we go quiet, when we get scared — that *is* them winning. That’s the whole game.

So I’m proud of Pete Buttigieg. I’m sorry it happened to him, to Chasten, to those two little kids. I can’t imagine it. But I am so damn grateful he told the story, and even more grateful that he’s staying in this fight. Because silence is part of the strategy. If enough good people stop speaking, stop organizing, stop running for office, stop showing up... they don't even have to beat us. We surrender. That is why this moment demands from all of us, the exact opposite — people who will steer into the skid, who will refuse to stop recording, who will relentlessly hold these monsters accountable, who will call it what it is, and who will not let them take this country away from us.

Don’t let them win.