Pete Buttigieg slams Mike Johnson for promoting a homophobic book that attacked him

Out Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg came out swinging over the weekend after a book filled with conspiracy theories and promoted by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) got media attention.

The book, The Revivalist Manifesto by Scott McKay, is full of anti-gay insults directed at Buttigieg, including calling him a “queer choice” for the Cabinet, accusing Buttigieg of having “queer sanctimony,” and claiming that Buttigieg campaigned in 2020 on being “openly, and obnoxiously, gay.” McKay also called Buttigieg “Gay Mayor Pete Buttigieg” in a passage blaming him for supply chain issues as secretary of transportation.

Related: Marjorie Taylor Greene gets House GOP to cut Pete Buttigieg’s salary to $1 over his sexuality

Citing homophobic lies and false Facebook videos, Greene got her colleagues to vote to cut Buttigieg’s salary.

“What’s obnoxious is the idea that you can be coming back to race or sexuality as this author does constantly – you know, not just the way he talks about me, but the way he talks about Cabinet colleagues of mine,” Buttigieg said on CNN this weekend.

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“All kinds of things that mostly seem to come back to an obsession with identity, with either who you’re married to or what your race is, and very little, certainly very little of use about how to make this country a better place,” he continued.

When asked why Republicans seem obsessed with Buttigieg’s sexual orientation, he said, “It seems like they can’t think of anything else…. You have somebody who is taken seriously by none other than the speaker of the House of the United States, basically suggesting that the reason we had supply chain problems in the rebound from COVID wasn’t because of the factors in China shutting down and then sending their ships here all at once, it was because the secretary of transportation is married to a guy and not to a woman. They just can’t seem to let go of this.”

Johnson’s glowing foreword for the book was full of praise that included a positive discussion of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and a defense of podcaster Joe Rogan’s past use of the N-word.

“Scott McKay presents a valuable and timely contribution with The Revivalist Manifesto because he has managed here to articulate well what millions of conscientious, freedom-loving Americans are sensing,” Johnson wrote in the book’s foreword.

He promoted the book in 2022 on social media and also spent a whole episode of his podcast discussing the book with his wife, Kelly Johnson, and the author.

“I obviously believe in the product, or I wouldn’t have written the foreword. So I endorse the work,” he said of the book on his podcast, calling McKay a “dear friend.”

But that was before he became speaker of the House. When CNN asked him about his endorsement of the book last Friday, a spokesperson said that Johnson “never read the passages highlighted in the CNN story, which he strongly disagrees with. He wrote the foreword as a favor to a friend, supportive of the general theme of the book but not as an endorsement of all the opinions expressed.”

“Pretty hard to believe,” Buttigieg said when asked about that statement. “I’ve often been called to write a blurb for a book. He didn’t just do that, he didn’t just put a quote on the back of it. He wrote a forward that is in the book, then had this guy on his podcast, and then went out of his way to say things associating himself both with the author and with the book.”

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