Pete Buttigieg’s Ordeal Is A Frightening New Form Of Political Harassment

The news that former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was investigated by Child Protective Services for a false allegation of child abuse was surprising. Not that an accuser would attempt such a cruel form of harassment—this, unfortunately, is not shocking at all—but because nobody seems to have aimed this particular tactic at a prominent politician before. Even in these unimaginative days, Americans are still capable of new innovations in cruelty.

“Someone decided to hurt our family this week,” Buttigieg wrote in a Substack post last week. Buttigieg, the first openly gay Cabinet member and a likely Democratic presidential contender, wrote that state police and a CPS worker arrived at his home in the last week of June to investigate an anonymous report that Buttigieg may have harmed his 4-year-old twins. The matter was quickly resolved, but only after Buttigieg was separated from his children for 24 hours and CPS had interviewed them. State investigators in Michigan, where Buttigieg lives, determined that the tip had been false.

Life as a public servant in America requires an escalating tolerance for danger. Politicians, judges, election workers, school-board members, and librarians face online abuse, threats, true risk of physical violence, and bullying—persistent, creative torment that emerges from unexpected corners and darts back and forth across the line of physical and psychological peril. Now people considering a role in public life have a new nightmare to consider: the possibility that a malicious hoax will lead the state to take away their children.

As Buttigieg himself noted, his ordeal bears a striking resemblance to another contemporary form of harassment. “Swatting,” as it’s come to be known, involves a 911 caller alerting law enforcement to a supposed violent crisis at the target’s address. Police show up, guns drawn, to a peaceful home and a terrified victim. The tactic leverages the militarization of American police, placing the target and their family at risk of death or injury at the hands of confused law-enforcement officers.

Swatting began garnering public attention after a series of incidents in the 2000s and 2010s within the online-gaming world. One player would call in law enforcement to harass a rival, sometimes in livestreamed confrontations. Over the past decade, the tactic has crept into politics as well. A report last year by the National Association of Attorneys General found that swatting incidents have “increased significantly” since 2024 and have been wielded against members of Congress, federal judges, journalists, and even health-care providers.

[Spencer Kornhaber: The surprising reason for the new homophobia]

The rise of swatting reflects a larger cultural escalation. Donald Trump’s habitual viciousness toward his enemies, along with the public’s fury and distrust toward public officials that metastasized during the 2020 election and the coronavirus pandemic, created a breeding ground for politicized harassment. The U.S. Marshals Service, tasked with protecting the federal judiciary, has tracked a sharp increase in threats to judges over the past several years, particularly those who have ruled against Trump. In 2025, threats to members of Congress reached a record high. A 2024 study by the Brennan Center for Justice based on interviews with almost 2,000 state-level lawmakers found that 40 percent reported having been harassed or threatened.

Buttigieg’s experience with CPS seems consistent with this trend. Without knowing more about the motive of the person who placed the call, there is no definitive way to say whether this was an act of politicized harassment or an appalling expression of a personal grudge—like the gamers who swatted other players who annoyed them.

Michigan police have not released any information about the anonymous caller, who falsely alleged, according to Buttigieg, that “he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes.” As with swatting, a fake CPS call leverages the power of the state, and the shortcomings of existing systems, as a tool of violence. “My main concern is how a report this thin ever made it past intake in the first place,” Vivek Sankaran, who directs the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, wrote to me in an email. “An allegation that remote and that unrelated from anything about these actual children should never be enough to send investigators to a family’s door or to separate a parent from his kids, even for a day.”

Buttigieg is not just any parent; he is a prominent gay man, parenting two small children with his husband, in a moment when increasing numbers of LGBTQ people are reporting harassment. Queer parenthood, in particular, is the subject of particular viciousness by the far right, which has extended its initial wave of attacks on transgender people as “groomers” of children to target gay and lesbian adults as well. This is less a new development and more a resurgence of prejudices only recently pushed below the surface. Many LGBTQ parents have long feared that the state would use their sexual orientation as a reason to take away their children. These fears spring from an ugly history of official hostility: In 1996, for example, a Florida judge relied on a lesbian mother’s sexuality in granting primary custody of her daughter to her ex-husband, a convicted murderer who had just served eight years in prison for killing his first wife.

[Graeme Wood: Pete Buttigieg in the wilderness]

On Substack, Buttigieg noted that the swatting incident occurred “soon after we shared photos of our family on social media for Father’s Day.” In the past, he has been candid about his struggle to come to terms with his sexuality. “There were times in my life when if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife,” he said in a 2019 speech to the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, during his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But “if I had had the chance to do that, I would never have found my way to Chasten,” his husband—with whom, he said, he was hoping to one day have children. Now, his Substack post suggested, his Instagram post expressing his hard-won joy over his young family may have made him a target.

If Buttigieg’s experience is the beginning of a new form of harassment, officials are not powerless to respond. Falsely reporting child abuse is a crime in Michigan and many other states. Sankaran suggested that states should rethink allowing anonymous CPS reports—New York, for example, recently banned the practice—and should ensure that parents know their rights during CPS investigations and have access to legal counsel. After the growth of swatting, states passed new laws establishing criminal penalties for the practice. But these are only tactics to limit the damage, not to halt it from spreading. Ever the politician, Buttigieg concluded his Substack post with a call to action: “We cannot let American politics keep going in this direction.” Absent a huge shift in the tides of American culture, there is every reason to think it will.