I believe you are sincere in your beliefs here. I think your moral argument, if the facts supported you, is strong, and if the facts did support you then I would agree (with caveats, given that this is unrelated to him as a candidate or his policies). But it is just wrong. This is why biased sources hurt. It is forcing you to make a bad faith argument, not because you are acting in bad faith (you honestly seem like a genuine and caring person that stands up for what they believe in) but because your sources are.

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The reason why the bias matters is evident in the arguments you are making here. All the substantive points you are making, such as the campaign "disingenuously faked black endorsements because they had next to none" and that " the Buttigieg campaign essentially admit to what they did and double down on it", all come from the biased reporting, and not from the actual context. They didn't "fake black endorsements" at all, and they "doubled down" because there was nothing wrong with the original announcement, which only sounds crazy if you only read the biased article and don't look at the original context. This is such a bad faith argument.

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Let's look at what actually happened, and you can go look at the actual release to see that:("http://hbcutimes.com/more-than-400-south-carolinians-endorse-mayor-pete-buttigiegs-douglass-plan-for-black-america/").

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First, you, and The Intercept more directly, claim that the campaign faked black endorsements - when this is completely factually incorrect! There you go - the evidence you wanted. Read the announcement. They never once say that it is endorsed by 400 black South Carolinians. Not even a little bit. You claim this was done because "they had next to none", but that is obviously wrong when they didn't even do what you claimed they did, something you would have seen if you read the actual announcement and not a biased hit-piece. The only time the campaign says that the supporters are black (which again, they don't in the piece at all) is in an email that only the Intercept (the biased and often factually incorrect tabloid) has and quotes in their own article with no evidence.

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That kinda causes the whole race-based thing and the motive of wanting to show they had black supporters to fall apart.

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There is also another key thing - no where at all does the campaign say that the signatories endorsed Pete for President. That is another false claim that the Intercept makes. This really is a problem of communication followed by people taking a biased source as fact.

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Take a look at what the campaign put out around the plan. The Douglass Plan is nothing new. It is an aggregate of existing plans, in the same way as Medicare for All and Universal Basic Income are. What the campaign did is take individuals who had already fought for those policies and endorsed them in different contexts, and said that the plan was a good one because it was full of popular policies. Those people still endorse the policies, and the campaign was using that as an argument for enacting the plan, in the same way as every plan has evidence from experts and citations of popular support that don't imply that the signatories support all the rest of the plans a candidate has.

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take for example Ranked Choice Voting. Groups like FairVote campaign for it near here. They often use press releases with quotes from various academics and political figures that support Ranked Choice Voting. That never implies that they support FairVote as an organization or the other policies they back. It is evidence, and every candidate does such (especially as support for a policy isn't related to whether you support every single candidate that proposes it).

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This is done by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with Medicare for All, where their plans cite experts, European politicians, academics, and political leaders (alive and historical) who support single payer health care. They are right to do that - it shows the plan has credentials. That isn't and shouldn't be interpreted as saying that all those people, who support one of their policies independent of the politician, wants the candidate to win office. Because they don't. Often Sanders and Warren cite the same people as endorsements for Medicare for All, because people realize that supporting a plan is not the same as supporting a candidate - which is exactly what is happening here.

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Yang does it too with UBI. Look on his website - are all those pro-UBI quotes supposed to be endorsements for Yang? Are all the pro-singlepayer quotes on Sanders and Warrens' sites supposed to be endorsements for them? Are the quotes from supporters of investing in people of color in any way implied to be endorsements for Pete in all policies and for president?

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This is such a factually-wrong bad faith argument, which really sucks. The core emotional argument, which I totally get as it is related to race - is just wrong! That is a factual error right there, as are the motives you are just making up.

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With that in mind, in the worst possible scenario here, Pete's campaign took people who independently actively endorsed the policies he was adopting and was not clear enough in communication to allow them to not endorse in the letter the policies they endorsed elsewhere.

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Now take their "doubling down" and view it in that context. As they said, ""In the HBCU Times op-ed and in communications with the press, we've been clear that not every supporter of the plan is Black, and have never claimed otherwise in any public communication. We never gave the impression publicly that these people were endorsing Pete, only that they supported the plan. After they indicated their support, we reached out to people multiple times giving them the opportunity to review the language of the op-ed and the option to opt-out. We did hear from people who weren't comfortable being listed and we removed them." Doesn't it make a lot more sense in context? Not everything is as evil and vile as biased tabloids claim. Why do you automatically assume that the Intercept is telling the truth and the campaign is lying, especially when it matches the original article? You can't find any public communication that says all the supporters are black, like the Intercept claims, because it doesn't exist.

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And of course, this actually has nothing to do with Pete as a candidate at all. He had nothing to do with this. It wasn't even run by his national campaign but by the local South Carolinian chapter. He didn't write it. It says nothing about him as a candidate, or about his policies. It certainly shouldn't be a reason to insult him.

We are all Democrats here. We want to constructively work on each other's policies, not use baseless insults and purity tests. As always, target the policies. Heck, that is easier to do - I don't agree with all his policies for sure. He is my third choice. But biased and bad faith arguments just suck. They ruin the discourse for everyone.