The heckler, who wore a protective mask under his chin as he live-streamed his stunt to followers, once drove to Connecticut and posed as the uncle of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza, according to the Huffington Post.
Later in the video, supporters can be seen trying to interrupt Riches to which Buttigieg responds, “Don’t worry about it. we’re bigger than him.”
As the man continues with his protests, Buttigieg responds, “Can I finish my remarks? Are you afraid to hear what I have to say?” After repeating the latter question several times, he then asks the protester, “Do you denounce white supremacy?” Riches can be heard faintly responding in the background, “Yes!”
“Good!” Buttigieg replies. “Then we agree on something! That’s a beginning point. See if you can get your president to do the same thing.”
Despite Riches interruption, Buttigieg was able to stay on message, stressing the urgency of preserving LGBTQ+ rights following the appointment of conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. “It’s definitely important for us in the LGBTQ community to see what’s going on in the Supreme Court, to see people openly talking about rolling back marriage equality and knowing we gotta move in the other direction,” he says.
The speech wasn’t Buttigieg’s only viral moment in the past week. After making major waves for calling out Republican hypocrisy on Fox News earlier this month, he returned to the conservative news channel on Wednesday and criticized the president for leaving hundreds of followers stranded in Omaha, Nebraska the day prior.
The exchange came after Martha MacCallum, who hosts Fox’s The Story with Martha MacCallum, tried to compare Trump and Biden’s reelection efforts, suggesting that the president had been a more prolific campaigner.
“I’m not even sure those visits from Donald Trump are really helping him though, right?” Buttigieg hits back. “Like, you look at Omaha, his supporters out freezing in the cold, which is a great metaphor for how he has treated his supporters more generally across the country.”
Seven Trump supporters required hospitalization after the president’s campaign failed to hire enough buses to shuttle attendees of the rally back to their cars.
But Buttigieg notes that potential hypothermia isn’t the only danger that his reelection bid poses to supporters. Research from the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy group, has indicated that Trump’s rallies frequently result in COVID-19 spikes after the president comes to town. Buttigieg says Trump’s Wednesday rally in Arizona has the potential to “be a spreader event” for coronavirus.
“Which kind of symbolizes his inability to lead us out of this pandemic,” he says.
As of the time of publication, more than 230,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 and 9.1 million people have been infected. Even as rates soar in the battleground state of Wisconsin, the Trump administration again downplayed the crisis earlier this week by falsely claiming that it had ended the pandemic.
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