Here Are Your Clips Of Late Night Audiences Laughing At Loser Pete Hegseth
F-A-F-O what happens when you're such a fucking dork.
What happened yesterday, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump gathering all the nation’s generals and admirals in one room so they could lecture them about how it’s time to do crunches and shave (Hegseth) before we start launching wars against the American people (Trump), was awful.
But it’s also a teachable moment about how to respond to where we are right now. You defeat tyrants through constant mockery and derision, ridicule and truth-telling. When they threaten the jokesters and the truth-tellers, that’s when you turn up the heat. This is why people like Jimmy Kimmel are so threatening to authoritarians and Nazis and fascists. Nothing pierces an authoritarian’s sense of his own importance and power like the cacophony of voices pointing and laughing at them.
Speaking of Kimmel, when we watched Secretary Shitfaced yesterday, there was one moment that we, as a Professional Of The Hilarious Laughing Arts, were hoping the late night moments would seize on, not because we particularly cared what specific jokes they told about it, but because we wanted the clips out there of Hegseth speaking these certain words, and then immediately having to endure Americans laughing at him.
We are of course talking about that prissy hysterical loser moment when Hegseth pulled his camouflage Pull-Ups all the way up around his nipples, struck his most threatening pose, affected the greatest swagger he could affect — and we know about his swagger, because we saw him trying to do the griddy the other night LOLOL what a fucking loser — and he looked at the camera and he issued this warning to any American adversaries who might think of messing with the American department of WAR!
“Should our enemies choose, foolishly, to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision, and ferocity of the War Department. In other words, to our enemies, F-A-F-O.”
Try to watch the video without just losing it.
See? You can’t. And neither can late night audiences. Because both Kimmel and Stephen Colbert made use of that clip, and you can watch them both, and Donald Trump can watch them both, and Secretary Shitfaced can watch them both. Watch these audiences spontaneously laugh their asses off at Hegseth’s attempt at being manly, which he thinks is his great talent, bless his heart.
It’s super fun because Colbert was Jimmy's guest last night, and Jimmy was Colbert’s guest. These two men who are the ants in Donald Trump’s authoritarian, yellowed granny panties, who his little bitch henchmen have been working so hard to silence.
Below the jump, some clips.
Colbert used the moment to make fun of Hegseth racking himself in the nads with a skateboard on “Fox & Friends Weekend” literally this year, a clip that was all over the place for some reason yesterday. Then he started making fun of Shitfaced going “five-star douche” — the highest ranking he’ll ever achieve, by far — with his silly little threats to generals, the American people, and our adversaries. And just listen to the audience laugh when that clip is over.
“Ohhhhhhh,” said Colbert afterward, putting his hand over his mouth, affecting pity for Hegseth and his line that he thought was just gonna KILL with those generals and admirals. “Oh nooooooooo. I know that feeling. I’ve been there!”
It’s rough, man, sucking that hard.
And then there was Jimmy.
Kimmel joked about Shitfaced summoning these generals and admirals — all of whom outrank weekend soldier Hegseth — from the “frontlines” of Portland and DC, then he played the same clip. “F-A-F-O!” And his audience also responded by laughing in the secretary of WAR!’s face.
“He’s so awesome,” said Kimmel, using the humorous tool known as “sarcasm.”
And then they just kept laughing at him.
“Usually when people gather in a room for Pete Hegseth, it’s an intervention.” And so forth.
And then he made fun of Trump a lot.
Mockery, ridicule and derision. Daily and constantly. It is the way.
Speaking of yesterday, if you’re curious how all that loser tyrant shit landed in the room of stone-faced generals and admirals, we’re starting to get a few reviews — notoriously tight-lipped crowd, generals and admirals! — and they ain’t what one would call “good.” In fact, there hasn’t been one leak of a general saying “He’s so awesome,” although we bet some of them might have said that the same way Jimmy did, with “sarcasm.”
Pentagon reporter Helene Cooper reported on MSNBC shortly after the event yesterday that she had been talking to all her sources — generals and admirals who were in that room — and she couldn’t find one single person who was impressed with the limp-dicked losers on display in that room yesterday. That’s our colorful description, of course. Here’s what Cooper said:
“I have yet to find a single military official who was in the audience today who thought that this was a good presentation,” she told MSNBC on Tuesday afternoon.
“All I’ve had from them so far, from the people I’ve talked to, is a combination of disbelief that some of them were made to fly from, some of them, Asia, from all over the world ... all the way to Quantico to listen to the same familiar type of culture war complaints that we’ve been having since Trump was reelected,” she added, calling Trump’s remarks a “campaign-style stump speech.”
“Nothing that was said today could not have been put in an email or in a directive. So there’s that, to begin with.”
LITERALLY EVERYONE made the joke that it could have been an email. We bet one-thousand generals made it to their general friends at the generals club afterward.
Ours was the funniest, though, we were the only ones who said it could have been a spam email, for boner pills.
More Cooper:
“There’s also the fact that so much of this was partisan, and this is a military that is supposed to present itself as nonpartisan. So you didn’t hear the kind of cheering that we usually get, because President Trump is used to playing for the type of crowds that favor him,” Cooper explained. “And so he’s not very used to performing in front of an audience that’s just giving, looking back stone-faced. But that’s what you were getting from these generals.”
The other thing she noted is that she’s gotten “so many emails from women in the military” who are seeing this as a message “that they are not welcome.”
Man, they nailed it. F-A-F-O, we guess.
Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan report for The Atlantic on how uncomfortable and silent the generals and admirals were during the speeches, and shared what their sources in the room had to say:
Some officers we spoke with voiced concern about how Hegseth’s message would affect recruiting and retention, metrics that have been improving over the past year. One general officer who attended the speech told us that Hegseth’s new policies on discipline, promotion, grooming, and fitness will complicate efforts by women and Black troops to advance and flourish in the ranks. “He wants to make it harder for service members to file complaints for harassment and bullying, which only paves the way to discriminate [against] the force until it looks how he wants it to,” the officer said.
Then there was the woman officer they spoke to, who had this to say, among other things, about Hegseth’s speech and its weird focus on PT and shaving:
“It’s something I would expect from a captain or a major,” the officer said. “I don’t want the secretary of war to be focused on baseline PT stuff.”
We hope you see how grievous the insult in there is. If you don’t, the joke is that the current secretary of WAR! doesn’t actually have quite the military experience/expertise to be talking about more brainy topics.
Eliot A. Cohen made it more explicit in the same publication. First he noted that Hegseth was “living the dream” of every loser who ever wasn’t very remarkable at their job, but then fantasizes about sticking it to everybody who ever didn’t grasp how awesome they really were:
There is a certain kind of Army officer who, after the excitement of company command, finds his career stalled, and who perhaps leaves the service as a major in the National Guard filled with bitterness and resentment. He may then dream of one day being in a position to make all the superior officers who failed to appreciate his leadership qualities, his insight, his sheer fitness stand to attention and hear him lay down the law about what it is to be an officer, and threaten to fire those who do not meet his standards. In this respect, and this respect only, on that stage Pete Hegseth was living the dream.
And then he noted how, well, childish Hegseth sounded, talking to that room full of grownups:
In all other respects, however, he was ridiculous. While much of what he said was unobjectionable (working out and getting haircuts are good things, after all), it was the kind of thing that a battalion commander might say to some scruffy lieutenants and sergeants. Indeed, Hegseth could not help himself, using we when he mentioned those in the service. The whole point of having a secretary of defense is that he or she is a civilian, first and foremost, and not a soldier. Hegseth’s examples, moreover, were drawn primarily from the only military things he knows firsthand—that is, the kind of tactics, training, and maintenance that a captain in charge of 150 soldiers has to worry about.
Maybe he has some hot tips on scrubbing the latrine also?
But let’s put away such low-ranking things and return to the generals and admirals and what they thought of what they saw yesterday.
It’s not that we think the generals are going to save us — let us please not fall into such thinking, LOL — but we do think a big part of this fight, on top of the mockery and ridicule and public acts of disrespect and refusal, is to exploit every one of these weaknesses and fissures that appear, and if part of that is continually noting that the generals and admirals who were conscripted into that audience seemed thoroughly unimpressed, and that they pretty much all most likely think Pete Hegseth is an unqualified pompous ass and a fucking loser who isn’t qualified to pick up their dogs’ shit, wellllllll goddamn so be it.
And when you’re done with that, head over to all the Military Reddits to see what THEY are saying about Secretary Shitfaced, because their reviews are in too, and daaaaaaaamn they are bein’ fuckin’ MEAN.
[RawStory / Atlantic / Atlantic]
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