This thread is powerful because it invites us to imagine being haunted by this weird rat-like boy your whole fucking life, watching on in horror as he actually comes somehow close to forcing the world into alignment with his wildest West Wing fantasies. But it also serves a more specific critical purpose: it gets to the heart of Mayor Pete’s weirdness. Indeed, Buttigieg is perhaps the weirdest politician to emerge in U.S. politics since Donald Trump. Stilted and curiously empty, he is a man without qualities whose politics fall somewhere between the vague and the underwhelming and the obviously, callously brutal; whose motivations seem to be set back somehow at a remove from our own. Whose campaign platitudes often have the slightly otherworldly sense of something generated by an AI; who can “win” the Iowa caucus just by proclaiming that he has. Given everything, it is perhaps unsurprising just how much speculation there has been that Buttigieg is in the CIA.

—Tom Whyman, in “Will we ever be free of Pete Buttigieg?”