Brash and bellicose, he sounded more like a cartoon bully than a sombre statesman. “Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” Pete Hegseth, wearing a red, white and and blue tie and pocket square, bragged to reporters at the Pentagon near Washington. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
Hegseth, 45, a former Fox News TV host who now commands the world’s most powerful military, has this week become the face of Donald Trump’s war in Iran. That has set off for alarm bells for critics who warn that the Secretary of Defense – pointedly rebranded “Secretary of War” – has rapidly transformed the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological and religious crusade.
With machismo, Christian nationalism and callousness toward the lives of US troops, they say, Hegseth’s puerile displays on TV are aimed at sating Trump’s desire for a warmonger worthy of the manosphere. This was reinforced by a lurid social media video that intersperses clips from Hollywood blockbusters such as Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and Top Gun with Hegseth and real kill-shot footage of the attacks in Iran.
Janessa Goldbeck, chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy organisation, said: “Pete Hegseth is a very dangerous person. He’s a white Christian nationalist and has the arsenal of the United States government at his disposal and a permission slip from President Trump to deploy carnage wherever he wishes against whomever he wishes.”
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Gee - who would’ve thought that putting a drunk, ignorant, racist asshole with the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old in charge of the military was a bad idea?
On a related note, hardly a day goes by without me being pleased and relieved that I decided long ago that I didn’t want children. I can’t imagine being responsible for bringing a child into this shithole country.
I can’t imagine being responsible for bringing a child into this shithole country.
On one hand, I agree. On the other, younger generations are only going to get dumber and dumber.
dumber and dumber
I don’t think that even matters - the way things are going, the psychopaths are going to destroy human civilization before the idiots even get a chance.
I think that the only chance we have lies in not thinking that way. If the psychopaths have already convinced you that they’ve won before they’ve won — then they really have already won.
On a related note, hardly a day goes by without me being pleased and relieved that I decided long ago that I didn’t want children. I can’t imagine being responsible for bringing a child into this shithole country.
Same, also, parenting is now cost-prohibitive.
Kinda just nice to look at international publications and see that, yes, you’re not crazy despite the gaslighting and we really did put an inept, stupid, and drunken TV show host in charge of actual wars.
