The New Dark Age

Pete Hegseth displays an utter ignorance of reality and an ideologically-blinded worldview combined with a view of himself as a holy warrior against the Godless Commies (China) and Islam. He was a high school valedictorian and American football player before becoming an undergraduate at Princeton (politics, graduating in 2003). There he played in the university basketball team, was editor-in-chief of a conservative newspaper and declared that he would “defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.” He also joined the US armed services through the Reserve Officers Training Core.

Apart from a stint at Bear Stearns as an equities market analyst, Hegseth served in Guantanamo where he guarded detainees and in Iraq where he acted as a civil affairs officer. In 2006 he moved to New York as a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a socially conservative neoliberal organization founded by the son of a wealthy mining family and an oligarch courtier. From 2006 to 2011 he lead the political activist group Vets for Freedom but it failed under his leadership and he was removed. In 2011 he joined the Minnesota National Guard and served in Afghanistan working at the Counterinsurgency Training Centre in Kabul. He also obtained a degree in public policy from Harvard in 2013. He then worked at Concerned Veterans of America, a group funded by the Koch brothers, which he left in 2016 due to his own leadership and alcoholism issues. He also made a financial payment to a woman who accused him of raping her in 2017, and there is evidence of sexual impropriety and misconduct at the two veteran’s organizations; as noted in this New Yorker article.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

… his mother, Penelope Hegseth, sent him an e-mail excoriating him as “an abuser of women” who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” She admonished him, “Get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”

… In 2016, Justin Higgins, a former Republican opposition researcher, vetted Hegseth for under-secretary roles in the first Trump Administration, on behalf of the Republican National Committee. In a commentary for MSNBC, Higgins wrote that, although he believes that Hegseth is “perhaps one of the least qualified picks for Secretary of Defense that we’ve seen,” he thinks that Hegseth “was likely chosen because he seems willing to say and do anything Trump wants.” It hadn’t hurt, Higgins added, that Hegseth belittled some war crimes, and that “Trump thinks he looks and sounds good on TV.”

In 2014 he joined Fox News and was a regular contributor and then host between then and 2024. In 2019 he joined the District of Columbia National Guard, but was barred from serving on duty at the Biden inauguration due to his Deus vult (used as a motto of the Christian far-right) tattoo.

In 2016 he published his memoir In the Arena in which he venerates the views of oligarch imperialist and white supremacist Teddy Roosevelt from the turn of the twentieth century while attempting to sell himself as a modern day version of the man. In 2020 he published a book American Crusade: Our Fight To Stay Free in which he defined an “Americanism” that was in opposition to socialism, secularism, environmentalism, Islamism, progressivism and feminism. In 2022 he co-authored Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation with the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. In 2024 he authored The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.

In reality, Hegseth has hardly ever served in real active combat; for which he was awarded a combat infantryman badge. His two bronze stars are without the “V” device that denotes for valour in combat, instead they were rewarded for commendable job performance on deployments; to put it bluntly an award for not fucking things up that was awarded liberally in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let’s also remember that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in no way equal wars, with US troops predominantly fighting with para-militaries while enjoying overwhelming superiority. Numerous veterans of those wars that became mercenaries in Ukraine found that war with Russia was a much, much worse experience. Below is the reality of what fighting for the oligarchs with a military that worked to dehumanize the local populations is like.