It is the end of an era, though many might not be aware. After months of rule and a final mad dash for the throne, Pete “the Rat King” Buttigeig has dropped out of the presidential race.

His candidacy was built on foundations familiar to Democrats who only recently became supportive of progressive policies and do not fully understand that Democrats can be racist, too. The Rat King began his campaign looking to corner this market of mostly white voters who saw that he was a part of the lgbtqia+ community and said to themselves “That’s all I need to know to support a candidate!”

Like the rodent he embodies every day, Buttigieg’s true colors could only be found after you pulled up the floorboards and looked at the decay underneath. The first hint was that only white people liked the Rat King. When a little digging was done about racial tensions in South Bend during his mayoral term, suddenly the Rat King’s jesters were nowhere to be found. They skittered into the cracks and crevices of their suburban McMansions and forgot about the minorities that were inconvenient to their moral compass.

Pete was also not kind to poor people, a stance full of irony considering the foreclosed homes he demolished were so often the home of his very own rodent brethren. While truly progressive candidates offer rent control policies, the rat watched as his city pushed out underprivileged people to make way for housing that cost upwards of $1,000 a month.

But now it does not matter — because Rat King Pete has scurried away. His white, upper-middle class voters that buoyed him this far into the race were not enough to get him to super Tuesday. But where does a gay rat go to be safe? He goes back to the establishment that created him — the Democratic party.

A veritable hive of rodents, the old rat party welcomes mild progressives back into their fold so they may be recycled and placed into future elections to stunt the growth of more popular progressive candidates. The rat den is afraid of losing its status as woke, rich white people, and they will take people like Pete back into their fold so they may continue their schemes into the future to solidify their rat fiefdom.

The rat den will do this by subtly manipulating the outcomes of elections, taking efforts to convolute the results of the primaries to make voters look toward other candidates. They might even call up candidates who are polling poorly and ready to drop out and tell them to stay in the race a little longer, just because they’re taking votes away from a candidate they do not want elected. Even worse, they might direct other democratic candidates to direct all of their resources into stunting the progress of another popular candidate if the target in question does not align with their interests.

These are the rats that the Rat King scurries to when his kingdom falls, and they continue to look on as we in the U.S. are looking down the barrel of another presidential election. To be clear, the rats corrupt the foundations of democracy, but they are still leagues better than the blatantly evil conservative cats that rule the household. Stuck between a rock and a mouse place, what is the reasonable voter to do?