Christians with a sense of history know the most startling conversions happen, not inside revival tents or through Christian programs, but on the campaign trail. The latest politically inspired transfiguration took place earlier this month, as Pete Buttigieg, the nation’s ostentatious LGBT political leader, claimed to be a Born Again foe of radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

In an interview last week, the failed 2020 presidential hopeful (who has his eye on running for office in Michigan) dismissed workplace diversity training that promotes the most radical forms of DEI caricatured by the TV comedy “Portlandia.” All the while, he claimed this represents no change in the Democratic Party’s ideology.

“We believe in the values that we care about for a reason. And this is not about abandoning those principles. It’s about making sure that we’re in touch with the first principles that animate them,” Buttigieg reassured his audience.

“What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for? Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of ‘Portlandia,’ which I have also experienced?” asked Buttigieg. Subjecting people to browbeating workplace lectures “is how Trump Republicans are made,” even “if that comes to your workplace with the best of intentions.” (Note: DEI training never comes with the best of intentions.)

“Mayor Pete” previewed his campaign pivot by insisting Democrats could turn DEI into a Big Tent broad enough to include Republicans and libertarians in a ponderous paragraph:

“I think — and this might sound counterintuitive — if we were more serious about the actual values and not caught up in vocabularies and trying to cater to everybody only in terms of their particular slice of combinations of identities versus the shared product. Actually if we thought about it a little bit differently, things like diversity would be actually an example of how we reach out beyond our traditional coalition. And what I mean by that is the opposite of diversity is uniformity. And if there’s one thing I really respect about principled conservatives, even if I don’t always agree with him, is that they have a horror of anything that has a whiff of being pressed into conformity, by government or by society. So I would like to appeal to people who, whether it’s because of a conservative or libertarian instinct or a more progressive instinct or I would say just an American belief that part of the point of living in a country like this is that you don’t have to conform to what other people demand of you. That we’re not only on board with that, we’re champions of that.”

(These sentences’ logic and diction should shame anyone who presents Buttigieg as a technocratic genius but attacked Sarah Palin’s speech patterns.)

The statements are the latest indication Buttigieg plans to run for higher elective office soon. Buttigieg has tried to walk back woke in January, when he removed “he/him” pronouns from his social media biography.

Mayor Pete Becomes Michigan Pete?

In 2022, as Buttigieg prepared to leave Washington, he moved to Traverse City. As a national political figure and the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana— just south of the state line in a region dubbed “Michiana” — Buttigieg already had name recognition. As a former analyst at McKinsey & Company, he has deep-pocketed connections. And no one has ever doubted he has the ambition and lust-for-power necessary to run for higher office.

Both Michigan’s governor and U.S. Senate seat are up for grabs in the 2026 midterms. Political analysts believe Buttigieg hopes to replace retiring Senator Gary Peters (D) and join Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin in the world’s greatest deliberative body. Buttigieg leads the Democratic primary polling handily with 40%; Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel placed a distant second with 16%. Yet an Epic-MRA poll show Buttigieg losing the general election to Mike Rogers by six points (47% to 41%).

Michigan, like every swing state, supported President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Buttigieg has publicly embraced the wrong side of the most potent issues motivating that stance, especially extreme gender ideology and bringing DEI into every workplace he could touch — beginning with his days as a mayor.

Born Again Buttigieg?

Pete Buttigieg began his long advocacy for radical DEI ideology as mayor of South Bend. In 2017, he forced South Bend police to endure a DEI training session titled ”Bridging Relationships and Strengthening Community Through Inclusion.” The presentation demanded the men in blue purge themselves of the influence of “parents or other older influences in our lives” who had the temerity to “openly express demeaning comments about other … gender roles.” These thoughtcrimes create the present evils of “racism,” “sexism,” “ageism,” “languageism,” “materialism,” “classism,” “colorism,” and “sizeism.”

The “Portlandia” advocacy continued as Buttigieg unsuccessfully sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

In a 2019 survey, the ACLU asked Buttigieg’s stance on giving prisoners and illegal immigrants “comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.” Buttigieg could hardly agree vociferously enough — beginning with his hostility to protections for Christians who oppose transgender surgeries and other procedures.

“I would immediately withdraw the June 2019 proposed Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation weakening the non-discrimination provisions of the Affordable Care Act governing all federally-funded health care and support the immediate enactment of the federal Equality Act prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity,” Buttigieg wrote. “I would direct my HHS Office of Civil Rights and Department of Justice to vigorously enforce all federal laws against discrimination based on gender identity, including ensuring the provision of all medically necessary care for transgender Americans. This includes medical care for transgender individuals incarcerated in federal prisons and under immigration detention, and elimination of the Medicaid inmate exception.”

Buttigieg’s DEI push continued after President Joe Biden named him Transportation Secretary. A brief overview:

• In December 2020, Buttigieg “shared his priorities of safety, climate, equity and jobs as the four pillars that will drive the work he does at the Department” of Transportation (DOT).
• In March 2021, Buttigieg told the USAID-funded website Politico, “It’s the right moment to be looking at the equity implications of everything we do in the federal government.”
• Under Secretary Buttigieg, the DOT Workforce Equity Team immediately drew up DOT’s DEIA Strategic Plan for FY2022-FY2026. It lamented “there has not been a significant shift in the composition of the DOT workforce for the past six years,” which it aimed to change by impacting “five focus areas: Recruitment, Outreach and Hiring; Leadership and Professional Development; Retention; Workplace Culture; and Accountability.” 
• “Buttigieg launches $1B pilot to build racial equity in roads,” reported the Associated Press in June 2022.
• Just weeks after the train derailment at East Palestine, Ohio, Buttigieg remained so focused on DEI that he groused that there are too many white construction workers. “We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color that finally sees the project come to them but everyone in the hardhats on that project doing the good paying jobs don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood,” he said.
• In June 2023, as part of its “Year of Inclusion,” the FAA held a three-day-long symposium on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), including sessions dedicated to “Unmasking Unconscious Bias,” “Overcoming Biases Using Exponential Mindsets,” and “Understanding the Impact of DEIA.”
• In June 2024, Buttigieg announced $1.8 billion in awards from the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE), which, he said, gave him “privilege and pleasure.”
• In August 2024, Buttigieg appointed 23 members of the Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity (ACTE) to “provide independent advice and recommendations about issues of civil rights and various contexts of transportation equity,” to “share equity concerns raised in local and regional transportation decisions,” and “to institutionalize equity into Agency programs, policies, regulations, and activities.”
• More than 3,000 qualified applicants who sought to become air traffic controllers sued the federal government, claiming the Federal Aviation Administration (under the authority of Buttigieg’s DOT) rejected white applicants.

We will get the full extent of the Transportation Department’s DEI initiatives after the DOGE team works its way down to the department. But his record is robust.

Some of these measures — such as a policy to hire more FAA employees with psychiatric disorders — stretched back a decade, briefly ended during the first Trump administration, then revived under Biden and Buttigieg. Current Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy noted, in the “Obama years, there were some [DEI] principles that were brought into air traffic control,” which “brought in more people into the academy, but less people passed through the academy and became trained.”

Pete Buttigieg would like you to believe he has changed his position on the issue. But Christian historians know, election-year converts are the quickest backsliders.