Pete Hegseth: The Short Course

13 Steps to National Destruction

1.  Pete Hegseth, Trump's nominee for secretary of defense, has no qualifications for the job.  He has never run a large organization and has no national security expertise.

2.  Hegseth has zero notion of which other countries might threaten America or how.  In his books this is simply not a subject, beyond a few clichés.

3.  Hegseth does not believe in alliances.  For him, “NATO is a great example of dumb globalism.”

4. Hegseth wants a political army that bans women from combat roles, is purged of "cowardly generals," and is anti-woke. 

5.  Hegseth never notes that the politicized Russian army meets all of his standards perfectly, but is is ineffective and commits war crimes. 

6.  Hegseth never notes that the Ukrainian army, which does have women in combat, and is not politicized in the way he would like, has overperformed. 

7.  Hegseth has almost nothing to say about the most significant armed conflict of our time and has not visited Ukraine or learned anything about it.

8.  Hegseth’s misogynist gender politics are consistent with his polygamy and the accusations of rape. 

9.  Hegseth's enemies are all internal: the Left, Muslins, and immigrants.  He repeatedly claims that the Left wishes to annihilate everyone else, which is a call to violence. 

10.  Hegseth, a Christian Reconstructionist, believes that Americans should be governed not by law or by the Constitution but by God -- as interpreted of course by Hegseth and his friends.

11.  Hegseth calls for a "holy war" and a "crusade" against Americans who think differently than he does because "God wills it."  Trump is the pretext: Hegseth wants "to make crusade great again."

12.  Hegseth, according to his books, could be counted upon to ignore threats to America from abroad, and to use a purged and politicized military against “enemies within.”  This is consistent with Trump's avowed intention to build a kind of dictatorship on the ruins of a dysfunctional government.

13.  Hegseth thus represents a policy of regime change.  Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as part of a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.

PS: I wrote a much longer post on this subject, hewing to a thought that I had about the usefulness of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as a lens to see dangers of Christian Reconstructionism for the American republic. 

I think, though, that Hegseth's anti-qualifications for the position of secretary of defense are so blatant that they deserve a separate and clear presentation. 

As before, I rely upon and draw quotations from his books The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free (2024); Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (2023, with David Goodwin); and American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free (2020).