Critics say brash, bombastic Fox News host out of his depth to guide US military through murky new Middle East conflict
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 Pentagonnear 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 luridsocial media videothat 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.”
Hegseth’s rise would have been unthinkable under any other commander-in-chief. Born in Minneapolis, he studied politics at Princeton University and became publisher and editor ofthe Princeton Tory, a conservative student journal, where he frequently waded into culture-war issues such as feminism and homosexuality.
After leaving Princeton, Hegseth joined the US army national guard as an infantry officer. His service included deployments to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. He laterrevealed in a bookthat he told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.
Hegseth became chief executive of Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative advocacy group,but departed in 2016amid allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety and personal misconduct.
In 2018 Hegseth’s mother, Penelope,sent him an email that said: “You are an abuser of women – that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
Hegseth subsequently became a familiar face on TV as a contributor and co-host ofFox & Friends on Fox News, frequently interviewing Trump and defending his policies. He once wrote that, in the event of a Democratic election win, “the military and police … will be forced to make a choice” and “Yes, there will be some form of civil war”.
Source: Drudge Report
