Pete Buttigieg wrote in a Substack column this week that a CPS worker showed up at his home after an anonymous tipster accused him of committing "unspeakable violent crimes" against his four-year-old twins. He said the worker told him something that "made my stomach turn" — that he "was not to be alone around the children." The investigation found no substantiation. The story was over in about a day or two.

And almost immediately people started to flag the gaps. Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary, described the incident as a "swatting" — a term that typically refers to false emergency calls designed to trigger an armed law enforcement response. What he actually described was a CPS visit following an anonymous tip. Those are two meaningfully different things, and the distinction matters when the word "swatting" is being used to generate maximum public sympathy.

The claim that CPS "separated" him from his children drew particular scrutiny. An X user posting under the handle @Zacbunchanumbrs, who claims professional experience with CPS cases, pushed back directly: "Buttigieg is lying. I deal with these kinds of cases all the time. CPS does NOT separate you from your kids." CPS protocols across most states involve interviews and observation. Immediate removal of children requires a court order or evidence of imminent danger — not an anonymous, unsubstantiated tip.

Andrew Kloster, a former Trump Administration lawyer, added a personal note that raised eyebrows: "Buttigieg was weird around my kids when he and Chasten were our next door neighbors." That's an anecdotal claim, not evidence of anything specific. But it's the kind of detail that would prompt follow-up questions from any reporter who wasn't already writing the canonization story.

It was obvious that everyday people were doing better journalism and investigating than any media outlet cared to do. So the question became why the media accepted every detail of Buttigieg's account at face value without verifying the basic mechanics of how CPS actually operates.

CPS found no substantiation for the allegations. On that, everyone agrees. The anonymous tip was garbage. Nobody disputes that false reports are a real and serious problem, and weaponizing child welfare agencies against political opponents is genuinely dangerous regardless of who the target is.

But there's a difference between being the target of a malicious false report and crafting a public narrative that stretches what happened into something larger than the facts support. The former deserves sympathy. The latter deserves scrutiny.

The media gave Buttigieg the sympathy before anyone checked the facts. Now the facts are catching up, and nobody in those newsrooms seems interested in the update.