As a baleful Cabinet of Horrors coalesces, up next to run our vast military is "perfect Trump World monster" Pete Hegseth, a creepy, philandering, "inordinately unqualified" White Nationalist facing charges of drunken sexual assault. There's also his rabid Zionism, dodgy isolationism - a "globalist U.N" - zeal for war crimes and Christo-fascist call for a new "American crusade" against heathens, aka us: "God wills it." The goal: the launch of a Christian "educational insurgency" to take back America. Nothing to see here.
We didn't need it, but "more proof we live in Hell" came last week when Jack Smith moved to dismiss the two most brazen crimes by this country's most brazen criminal - the theft of both an election and a motherlode of classified documents. Smith acted "without prejudice" - rendering a legal return to the case possible if not improbable - thus preserving a long sorry line from Nixon/Watergate, Reagan/Iran-Contra, Bush/imaginary WMDs to Trump likely avoiding any consequences for his many appalling transgressions, at least in this life. Many are blaming a too-meek Merrick Garland for our latest "Mueller isn't coming" moment - his too little/ too late, his fear of appearing "partisan" or impolite when facing off against "a live grenade" - but we'd say it stems more deeply from the inviolability of our criminal master class, and of course a fascist-themed, Trump-rigged SCOTUS that protects them. (Thanks again, friggin' Susan Collins.)
Now gloatingly free of any accountability, he's lumbering ahead with his inept, corrupt Cabinet nominees, those loyal disruptors and bootlickers whose résumés of consequence-free bad behavior are enough as long as they bust things up once they get in power. Gaetz is gone, peddling tacky videos on Cameo; among the remaining cranks and clowns are RFK Jr., last seen on a podcast praising heroin as a study aid, and wrestling executive Linda McMahon, tapped to run the Dept. of Education until it's abolished. Along with her husband Vince, who has faced myriad earlier sexual misconduct allegations including rape and "depraved sexual demands," Linda is being sued by five adult sexual assault survivors who sayWWE allowed an announcer they knew was a pedophile - they'd fired him for it before rehiring him - to sexually groom, abuse and film them as children.
Still, Pete Hegseth could be the worst, with his Christian nationalist extremism and a "creeper vibe" so strong that even on the Fox set he was considered "a loose cannon," easy to provoke. An Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and former guard at Gitmo, he worked for a Koch bros' veterans' group but is otherwise entirely unqualified to lead a Defense Dept with three million service members and civilians and a $9-billion-plus budget - and that's without him being taken off duty for Biden's inaugural after his own National Guard unit called out his white supremacy tattoos, and his misogynist belief the Army's over 220,000 women soldiers in combat should go back to the kitchen. For one of them, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, that shows "his lack of understanding" of our military; no wonder, she adds, "There is already profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform.”
Bolstering her argument "this is not the kind of person you want to lead the Department of Defense" - never mind his X bio of "Christian, American, Husband, Father" - is his long tawdry history of infidelity with multiple wives and girlfriends."This guy's personal life is a total disaster," says a former RNC spokesman who calls his nomination "preposterous...He’s not qualified for the job and the judgment he’s shown privately leaves much to be desired." It was amidst some of that muck - Hegseth was getting divorced from his second wife after having a child with a co-worker who become his third wife - that he allegedly raped a woman during a 2017 encounter described in a graphic, 22-page, newly released police report from the city of Monterey, CA. Hegseth has denied the charge, but in 2020 he had the victim sign a nondisclosure agreement with a presumably hefty monetary settlement.
The incident happened the night of a GOP women's conference at a Hyatt Regency in Monterey. According to the police report, several women said a drunk Hegseth was putting his hand on their legs and asking them to come to his room; repelled by his "creeper vibe," one texted the victim "Jane Doe," 30, who works as an advocate, to see if she could help. Around 1 a.m., she confronted Hegseth near the pool about his behavior; they got into an argument loud enough hotel staff said they got multiple complaints, to which a "visibly intoxicated" Hegseth screamed he had "freedom of speech." Jane Doe, who police said was not drunk and "entirely coherent," apologized to the staff and tried to calm Hegseth. After they both joined other people at a nearby sports bar where Doe's memory got "fuzzy"; she believes someone drugged a drink she was handed there.
Later, she found herself in Hegseth's room. She told police when she tried to leave he grabbed her phone, blocked the door, stripped naked and sexually assaulted her as she kept saying "no." She recalled his dog tags hovering over her, his ejaculating on her stomach, his tossing her a rag to "clean it up." Days later, she went to a hospital for a sexual assault exam, and a nurse called police to report her claim; after their investigation, a report was sent to the A.G., but no charges were filed. Hegseth denied Doe's claims: He told police she wouldn't leave his room, he "didn't remember" much, but the sex was consensual; he did, though, admit that Doe showed "early signs of regret.” Afterwards, Doe said she suffered from nightmares and memory loss; after the election and Trump nominated Hegseth, one of her friends sent his team "a detailed memo" about the incident, but heard nothing back.
Of course most head-in-the-sand Republicans, in thrall to a legally adjudicated rapist and lifelong predator who's been accused of dozens of sexual assaults, don't want to hear about any more, thanks. They dismiss the slimy drunken Hegseth story as "allegations that distract us," arguing, "What we need is real, significant change in a Pentagon that's been more focused on pronouns (than) on lethality." (Whew.) Hegseth, in turn, has lied about the outcome, claiming he was "totally cleared," which he wasn't. Even at Fox News, some remain disturbed: In a pained rebuttal, Fox contributor and rape survivor Leslie Marshall cited, "with all due respect to my former colleague," the claim against him and his three documented cases of adultery, which she insisted are "relevant... You can’t lead an entire organization and all those people if you can’t lead by example."
Hegseth already had a long, sexist record: When Trump refused to apologize for his "grab-'em-by-the-pussy" atrocity, Hegseth praised him for rejecting "the rules of a game that's stacked against him - and all patriotic Americans." Even away from women, and despite an Ivy League education, he embraces a sort of universal vileness, happily playing the provocative barbarian willing to offend all. In a tackystunt on Fox, mindlessly seeking to stick it to the libs, he brought in his Harvard diploma, which he theatrically mutilated, crossing out "Harvard" to scrawl, "Critical Theory University." Like any good showman, he seems to relish an on-the-air, in-your-face format for his most incendiary moves, like a recent turn on a right-wing podcast where he urged creating a system of "classical Christian schools" to launch the underground army for an “educational insurgency” to win back the nation.
With Trump having kow-towed to evangelicals by promising tax breaks for Christian academies or home schooling to train kids to "courageously reflect a Biblical worldview in all aspects of their lives," Hegseth's concept of a "holy war" against godless heathens who disagree with him, introduced in a couple of his books, fits snugly into the MAGA agenda. Notably, if unsurprisingly, he uses military language to describe it. School choice is "great," he argues, but "phase 2 stuff for later on, once the foothold has been taken and the recruits have graduated boot camp." "We call it a tactical retreat, where you regroup, consolidate and reorganize," he says. "As you do, you build your army with the opportunity later of taking offensive operations in an overt way." He pauses, smirks at having said the quiet part out loud, adds, "Obviously, all this is metaphorical and all that good stuff," and laughs uproariously.
In his books - The War on Warriors, Battle for the American Mind, American Crusade - Hegseth repeatedly lays out a fervid, fascist, white nationalist fever dream wherein the American left, the dreaded "Marxists," are "the enemy within." "The radical left never stops moving and planning. They do not respect ceasefires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy - and then total control." Using the rhetoric of war - "Now is not the time to retreat,” "we won’t miss this war," "a clarion call to charge with everything we have into the breach" - he proposes "a frontal assault" to reclaim the nation's military from a "woke" left in a "cold civil war" that is not just political. In the military, "The expectation is we will defend (the country) against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies).”
Decoding the paranoid, self-serving The War on Warriors, Joe Allen calls it "Pete Hegseth's Mein Kampf," "one long political rant" offering, just like Hitler and his orange descendant, "a contrived nightmarish vision of society, where true 'patriots' are persecuted by a twisted and evil political establishment." He decries Hegseth's "ugly and dangerous mind," muddled by Die Hard fantasies, which sees a fatally "woke" military that "believe power is bad, merit is unfair...white people are yesterday, and safety is better than risk-taking." The country, he raves, "needs patriotic, faith-filled, and brave young Americans, not diverse recruits pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies...Busy killing Islamists in shithole countries - and then betrayed by our leaders - our warriors have every reason to let America’s dynasty fade away....Leftists stole a lot from us, but we won’t let them take this."
Trump proclaimed Hegseth would "return our military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability and excellence." His chosen fanatic vows to carry out those dubious tasks while removing officials not loyal enough to stay the despotic course, those losers who've embraced "gender equality, racial diversity, climate stupidity, vaccine worship, the LGBTQA+ alphabet soup in their recruiting," and the resulting "trannies from Brooklyn (and) lesbians from San Francisco" now serving their country. "We need to radically overhaul Pentagon leadership," he says. "Lots of people need to be fired." Also lots of international entities like an "anti-American, fully globalist UN" and a NATO that has "allowed itself to be invaded." "The defense of Europe is not our problem - been there, done that," he brays. "NATO is a relic that should be scrapped (for) freedom to be truly defended. This is what Trump is fighting for."
Also Israel, and God, in that order. Singularly bizarrely, Hegseth seems to frame US foreign policy almost entirely within the context of championing Israel (even more than we do now). “If you love America," he says in the true spirit of Christian fundamentalism dressed up as rabid Zionism, "you should love Israel." And if you love Israel, you must embark on "an American crusade" to protect it. His medieval crusader tattoos mean what we thought they meant - straight-up Christian nationalism, especially his “Deus vult,” Latin for "God wills it," a battle cry from the First Crusade. "Our present moment is much like the 11th century...We don’t want to fight, (but) we must," Hegseth rants. Christians "must pick up the sword of unapologetic Americanism and defend ourselves. Israel embodies the soul of our American crusade - the ‘why’ to our ‘what’. Faith, family, freedom, and free enterprise."
In 2019, Hegseth persuaded Trump to pardon several US soldiers charged or convicted of war crimes in Iraq, arguing that if our troops "make mistakes," they should "get the overwhelming benefit of the doubt." He continues to question the precepts of the Geneva Conventions, arguing that following certain civilized standards of war means "we are just fighting with one hand behind our back." What if, he asks, your enemy doesn't honor those same rules? What if, he muses, we treat them the way they treat us? "Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we will spare your life. If not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs," he suggests in one book as an admirably unwoke way to move forward in warfare. “If we’re going to send our boys to fight we need to unleash them to win. To be the most ruthless. The most uncompromising. The most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be."
That same brutal ferocity, lest we forget, would logically then be utilized against Hegseth's real enemies, the "enemy within." Chillingly, he recalls serving in the National Guard in D.C. during Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd's murder; seething, he describes peaceful people of conscience set upon by tear gas and baton-wielding police as "violent professional agitators" and "armies of armed and violent left-wing extremists." "Most of us (in the Guard) wanted to fight back," he writes. "We could easily have pushed this line back, snatched the leaders or the loudest protesters in Antifa, and sucked them back behind the lines." He is back in war, where he wants to be. "If this engagement were to occur in Damarra or Kandahar,” he continues, "we would be home by breakfast.” Which presumably would be the ripped-off arms of possible Al Qaeda. Or not; it was always hard to tell.
