cheerup domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home/keepcalmnprofit/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114For a few hours,<\/span> Pete Hegseth\u2019s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump\u2019s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn\u2019t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced<\/a> appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.<\/p>\n Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth\u2019s drawbacks are not limited to his light r\u00e9sum\u00e9 or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years. I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump\u2019s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war<\/em> metaphorically. He may be no less nutty than any of Trump\u2019s more controversial nominees. And given the power he is likely to hold\u2014command over 2 million American military personnel\u2014he is almost certainly far more dangerous than any of them.<\/p>\n Hegseth began his involvement<\/span> in conservative-movement politics as a Princeton undergraduate. He then joined the Army and quickly developed a profile, when not on active duty, as a budding Republican spokesperson. He testified against Elena Kagan\u2019s appointment to the Supreme Court (on the grounds that, while dean of Harvard Law School, she had blocked military recruiters from campus in protest of Don\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell) and lobbied in favor of the Bush administration\u2019s Iraq policy. As the Republican Party\u2019s foreign-policy orientation changed radically under Donald Trump, Hegseth\u2019s positions changed with it. But his devotion to the party remained constant. After stints running the advocacy groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, and a failed Senate campaign, he finally settled at Fox News, where he joined a chorus in support of Trump.<\/p>\n Along the way, Hegseth has written five books. The first, extolling Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s legacy, revolves around ideas that Hegseth has since renounced after converting to Trumpism. Another is simply a collection of war stories. The other three, all published in the past four years\u2014American Crusade<\/em> (2020), Battle for the American Mind<\/em> (2022), and The War on Warriors<\/em> (2024)\u2014lay out his worldview in florid, explicit, and often terrifying detail.<\/p>\n A foundational tenet of Hegseth\u2019s philosophy, apparently carrying over from his Roosevelt-worshipping era, is a belief in the traditional masculine virtues and the potential for war to inculcate them. Hegseth maintains that boys require discipline and must aspire to strength, resilience, and bravery. His preferred archetype for these virtues appears to be Pete Hegseth, whose manful exploits either on the basketball court (he played for Princeton) or the battlefield are featured in all three books.<\/p>\n [David A. Graham: The perverse logic of Trump\u2019s nomination circus<\/a>]<\/p>\n Hegseth complains that society no longer gives veterans like him their proper measure of deference. \u201cBeing a veteran no longer demands respect of the coastal elites or reverence from large swaths of the public,\u201d he writes\u2014an observation that will sound strange to anybody who has ever attended a football game or listened to a speech by a politician from either party. \u201cIn previous generations, men had to find ways to salvage their honor if they didn\u2019t<\/em> get to fight in a war.\u201d (The single strongest piece of evidence for Hegseth\u2019s thesis\u2014the popularity of lifelong coastal elitist, proud war-avoider, and POW-mocker Donald Trump\u2014goes unmentioned).<\/p>\n Hegseth\u2019s demand for greater respect grows out of his belief that he personally succeeded in the face of forbidding odds. \u201cI had been an underdog my whole life,\u201d he writes. \u201cI persisted. I worked my ass off.\u201d But the woke military, he complains, doesn\u2019t reward that kind of individual merit and grit. Instead, it has grown so obsessed with diversity that it promotes unqualified minorities and allows women in combat, reducing its effectiveness and alienating hard-working, meritorious soldiers such as, well, him. He also frets that the inclusion of women in combat erodes traditional gender norms. \u201cHow do you treat women in a combat situation,\u201d he asks, \u201cwithout eroding the basic instinct of civilization and the treatment of women in the society at large?\u201d<\/p>\n (The treatment of women by Hegseth specifically happens to be the subject of a recently disclosed police report<\/a> detailing an alleged sexual assault of a woman at a 2017 political conference. Hegseth denies the allegation and says that the encounter, which took place while he was transitioning between his second and third wives, was consensual. He paid the alleged victim an undisclosed sum in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.)<\/p>\n One episode looms especially large in Hegseth\u2019s mind as the embodiment of the wokification of the military and its abandonment of traditional merit. In 2021, Hegseth, an active National Guard member, wished to join the Washington, D.C., unit protecting incoming President Joe Biden\u2019s inauguration. The National Guard, however, excluded him from the detail because he was deemed a security risk on account of a bicep tattoo of the \u201cDeus Vult\u201d symbol\u2014a reference to the Crusades that is popular with some far-right activists.<\/p>\n The logic of the snub was straightforward. Biden\u2019s inauguration took place in the immediate aftermath of an insurrection attempt that had included many members of the armed forces, some operating within far-right networks. But to Hegseth\u2014who protests<\/a> that the Deus Vult tattoo is simply an expression of his Christian faith, not a white-nationalist symbol\u2014the decision was an unforgivable personal affront.<\/p>\n He expresses indignation at the notion that he could even be suspected of harboring radical ideas. \u201cI fought religious extremists for over twenty years in uniform,\u201d he writes. \u201cThen I was accused of being one.\u201d This is not as paradoxical as Hegseth makes it sound. Many of the people most eager to fight against extremists of one religion are extremist adherents of another religion. An example of this would be the Crusades, an episode that Hegseth highlights in American Crusade<\/em> as a model to emulate.<\/p>\n In any case,<\/span> evidence of Hegseth\u2019s extremism does not need to be deduced by interpreting his tattoos. The proof is lying in plain sight. In his three most recent books, Hegseth puts forward a wide range of familiarly misguided ideas: vaccines are \u201cpoisonous\u201d; climate change is a hoax (they used to warn about global cooling, you know); George Floyd died of a drug overdose and was not murdered; the Holocaust was perpetrated by \u201cGerman socialists.\u201d<\/p>\n Where Hegseth\u2019s thinking begins venturing into truly odd territory is his argument, developed in Battle for the American Mind<\/em>, that the entire basic design of the public education system is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot. Hegseth is not just hyperventilating about the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, or other left-wing fads, as conservatives often do. Instead he argues that the entire design of the U.S. education system is a Marxist scheme with roots going back to the founding of the republic. The deist heresies of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he writes, laid the groundwork to implant communist thought into the school system. Then, \u201cAmerican Progressives in the late 1800s blended the idea of Marxist government with aspects from the Social Gospel and the belief in an American national destiny in order to make Marxism more palatable to Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n The nefarious plan to turn America communist involves steps that appear anodyne to the untrained eye. \u201cYes, our modern social sciences\u2014like \u2018political science,\u2019 previously known as \u2018politics,\u2019 and \u2018social studies,\u2019 previously known as individual disciplines like \u2018history, economics, geography and philosophy\u2019\u2014are byproducts of Marxist philosophy,\u201d he writes. \u201cLet that sink in: the manner in which we study politics, history, and economics in American schools\u2014public and private\u2014today is the product of Marxists. That was always the plan, and it worked.\u201d Hegseth will no longer sit back and allow communist indoctrination to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run. His most recent book calls for a straightforward political purge of military brass who had the gall to obey Democratic administrations: \u201cFire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden\u2019s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military.\u201d Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines. He is reportedly<\/a> working on an executive order that will fast-track the removal of officers \u201clacking in requisite leadership qualities\u201d and compiling<\/a> a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan retreat, who will likewise be shoved out.<\/p>\n To what end? Trump has already signaled his interest in two revolutionary changes to the Defense Department\u2019s orientation. One is to legalize war crimes, or at least cease enforcement of the rules of war. The president-elect has enthusiastically endorsed<\/a> the use of illegal military methods and has pardoned American soldiers who committed atrocities against detainees and unarmed civilians, following a loud campaign by Hegseth on Fox News.<\/p>\n [Graeme Wood: War crimes are not difficult to discern<\/a>]<\/p>\n In The War on Warriors<\/em>, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of \u201crules of war\u201d just more woke nonsense. \u201cModern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,\u201d he writes. \u201cOur enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.\u201d He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (\u201cjagoffs\u201d), even claiming that their pointless rules are \u201cwhy America hasn\u2019t won a war since World War II.\u201d (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)<\/p>\n Writing about his time guarding prisoners at Guant\u00e1namo Bay\u2014where, as even the Bush administration eventually admitted,<\/a> most detainees were innocent men swept up by American forces\u2014Hegseth describes calls for due process as a stab-in-the-back against brave soldiers like himself. \u201cThe nation was dealing with legal issues (mostly led by weak-kneed, America-hating ACLU types) concerning enemy combatants, \u2018international rights\u2019 of illegal combatants, and the beginnings of extrajudicial drone attacks,\u201d he writes. \u201cNot to mention the debate about the \u2018rights\u2019 of assholes (I mean, \u2018detainees\u2019) at Gitmo.\u201d<\/p>\n