It isn’t hyperbole, it’s what he said:

Buttigieg is struggling with black voters for several reasons.

First, Buttigieg said that he can relate to the black American struggle because he is gay. This did not sit well with many:

That has angered some African Americans, who view it as an attempt by a privileged white man to claim a type of victimhood that is distinct from the black experience in America, even while others take the comments more favorably.

Oliver Davis, a black council member in South Bend, Ind., where Buttigieg is mayor, said that African Americans, unlike gay people, don’t have the option of “coming out” at their chosen moment — as did Buttigieg, who disclosed his sexual orientation after he had been elected mayor.

Then Buttigieg used a stock photo of a Kenyan woman in materials on his disastrous rollout to address racism concerning black Americans. His Douglass Plan trumpeted a list of 400 South Carolinians claiming many of them were black leaders (many of them weren’t actually black or South Carolinian) and included names of those who hadn’t given their endorsement. (Why didn’t he have a Douglass Plan in South Bend as mayor?)

Third, it’s hard to forget a guy that reads talking points from a sheet in the faces of angry voters:

More:

Both Buttigieg’s record on race relations and his management of the South Bend Police Department are seriously questionable. This most recent incident aside, Buttigieg removed the city’s first African American police chief, naming a white replacement, and the whole department has grown less diverse during his tenure.

Buttigieg’s camp claim he struggles with black voters because they don’t know him well enough:

“The voters of South Carolina are still getting to know Pete,” said Lauren Brown, Buttigieg’s South Carolina spokeswoman. “And what we’re observing on the ground is the more they learn about Pete, the more they want to know.” A Buttigieg aide added that 60% of black voters in the recent Quinnipiac poll said they didn’t know enough about Buttigieg to have an opinion.

[…]

And multiple aides now acknowledge that the campaign was slow to organize campaign events around black engagement, particularly in South Carolina.

Not so, say many.

King might press him to explain why black voters should trust and support him given his record of siding with racist South Bend police officers and against their African-American chief. King might want him to explain his willingness to gentrify predominantly black neighborhoods in the name of “beautification,” or why his campaign promoted a fraudulent endorsement list of African-American leaders in South Carolina. And King might demand an answer for the lack of diversity in his city leadership and on his campaign.

Yes, black voters are more religious than other groups and Democrats don’t quite yet know how to handle this without running afoul of their own social justice warrior rules governing who is and isn’t racist and why. The most Democrats have done is excuse his lower poll numbers with black voters by ignoring black voters’ concerns over Buttigieg’s tenure as mayor and instead emphasizing how the older generation of black voters are resistant to a gay candidate.

Knowing this, Buttigieg tried to hustle up some support for himself by claiming that Trump voters endorse racism by supporting Trump — an absurd remark that betrays the faith he uses as a cudgel to condemn critics rather than spread the good news and win souls for the kingdom. (I remarked on this earlier.)

So according to Buttigieg, Democrats who were good enough to pull the lever for the Bill Clinton, for Al Gore, for Obama suddenly are racists because they didn’t vote for the elderly white woman in 2016. Democrats still do not understand how Trump won. He didn’t win by branding a new crop of Republican voters, he won over Democrats in blue areas because he spoke about the issues that affect their day to day lives: jobs, trade, manufacturing. Meanwhile Clinton droned on about sexism and virtue signaling — when she could be bothered to campaign.

As I predicted in my book Flyover Nation, Hillary’s tactic didn’t win voters for herself, she drove them into Trump’s arms. Low unemployment numbers, lower taxes, booming business have won these voters’ support for a second Trump term. Meanwhile, Democrats still promote the canard that racism determined the 2016 electoral outcome.

Two things: No one denies the existence of the evil that is racism — and no one should excuse the evil that would motivate someone to falsely claim that an entire group of 63 million people excuse racism because they voted for, or are planning to vote again for, Trump. It’s a shameful tactic used by a politician trying to bolster his own failing numbers with the black community. For Buttigieg to say this — he’s really saying “people who think differently than I do on the economy, foreign policy believe that some people are more redeemable than others because of skin color or are fine with this notion.”

His remark is a heinous accusation that betrays the faith he claims. Buttigieg is himself using race to appeal to a demo with which he’s struggling (his term as mayor particularly). He’s bearing false witness for the purpose of emotionally injuring people whose pain he wants to manipulate for his own benefit. Does this sound like a politician who cares?

P.S. I spoke about this on my radio program today (watch here also):