Pete Buttigieg Interview (Trimmed Bits)

Hey guys,

There’s been a narrative circulating on X which suggests that in the wake of my decision to make small modifications to the Pete Buttigieg interview and re-upload to Patreon, I did some sort of massive editorial overhaul to take Pete out of context and engineer a ‘gotcha’ moment. Normally, I’d ignore this sort of backlash but I’m trying to build credibility amongst establishment politicians for the upcoming midterms and I need to nip this narrative in the bud before it spreads any further.

So to clarify - aside from the insertion of a single fact checking slide, I did not modify anything about Pete and I’s original conversation regarding Israel-Palestine, nor did I modify or edit any of the conversation to take his words out of context. What I DID do, is trim out certain bits that I felt were slightly off-track, inconsequential to the core of our conversation, or outdated from a news-gathering perspective. Given that we often film things a few weeks prior to release, ‘trimming fat,’ as we call it, is often standard practice for C5 as we go through rounds of edits and prepare for a public YouTube drop.

I genuinely don't believe that any of the trimmed bits from the Mayor Pete interview would have been noticed if not for our transparency in explaining our decision to make a re-upload, but unfortunately, there is now a narrative that our re-edit is somehow drastically different from the original, which is a misrepresentation. So that said, I’ve uploaded all of the ‘trimmed’ bits to a Patreon-exclusive supercut here so that you can see what was chopped, as well as an explanation as to why it was cut.

Trimmed Bit 1: this bit, recorded via zoom from Arizona, focuses on the Jimmy Kimmel firing and broader implications of Trump’s crackdown on late night TV hosts. A day after we recorded this interview, Kimmel was reinstated. Felt like a bit too much of a focus on an expired news item, so I cut this conversation in half for the new cut.

Trimmed Bit 2: this bit focuses on Studebaker’s history in South Bend and Pete’s time as an Indiana mayor. Given that this bit arrived in the midst of our conversation about establishment Dems’ problem with endorsing Zorhan Mamdani, which I ultimately brought us back to after our brief Indiana convo, which really didn't go to deep.

Trimmed Bit 3: this bit is a story about one of Pete's coworkers believing that Chasten, his husband, was actually his 'friend.' This bit arrived in the midst of our conversation about Tucker Carlson's 'fake gay' claims and took things off-track.

Trimmed Bit 4: this bit was about his decision to join the U.S. military, which interrupted our conversation about parallels between the 'War on Terror' in both Israel and the U.S. and the weaponization of language by politicians.

Because these four bits amount to over 15 minutes of cut runtime, I can see how someone might get the impression that I drastically cut important sections of this interview due to woke mind virus. Hopefully this clears all of that up. That said, I am going to re-insert these bits into the final cut when we upload to YouTube as to eliminate whatever room there may be for conspiracy. I really don't like being perceived as a self-righteous spin doctor and I know how quickly things can get out of hand without my direct and specific input during moments of controversy. I hope you guys are having a good day and you can expect the interview to be live on YouTube at 9 A.M. tomorrow.

BEST,

AC.