You Will Be Shocked, Shocked To Read The Latest Headlines About Pete Hegseth
Shocked.
And now an update on Pete Hegseth, the wildly unqualified Fox News host that Ginger Donya is trying to hire to be the secretary of purging the Defense Department of disloyals, getting the military to shoot Americans for protesting, and handing Putin Ukraine.
Would you be surprised to hear Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault, and reportedly paid a settlement to the accuser? Or that a certain former president — an adjudicated rapist — who owes some hefty bucks for sexual assault and defamation himself heard all about it and did not find it disqualifying? Of course nyet.
Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear about it.
The alleged assault happened in October of 2017 at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa in Monterey, California, where Hegseth had been invited to address the California Federation of Republican Women, and presumably give a rah rah talk about how wokeness is ruining the world, Christians are persecuted the very worst of anybody, and women shouldn’t be in combat, or something.
The accuser, Jane Doe, was at the conference with her husband and kids, and somehow got tasked by conference organizers with making sure Hegseth made it back to his room and got up in time the next morning to make it to the airport, because apparently he is not enough of a grownup to do that himself.
Doe was not hanging out with Hegseth, but she got texts from two women at the bar, complaining that the host was booze-soaked, horny and “getting pushy about his interest in taking them upstairs to his room.” So Doe collected a “visibly intoxicated” Hegseth and walked him to his room. What happened next was in dispute, with Hegseth claiming the encounter was consensual, Hegseth’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore saying the woman was “the aggressor,” and the woman feeling aggressed-upon enough to go the police and hospital and to have a rape kit done, where bruising was noted on her thigh. No charges were filed, but two years later the woman sued Hegseth, and he settled for an undisclosed amount and had her sign an NDA because, he said, he did not want the accusation to hurt his career at Fox News, LOL.
Fox News would never stand for such a thing!
Internally, team MAGA members can’t agree on if pushy Pete was either not vetted at all, or vetted poorly, so that they missed this, and neither is good.
And then there’s how Pete got flagged and pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, after a fellow service member alerted higher-ups to his bicep tattoo, which says Deus Vult, “God wills it,” a battle cry from the Crusades that’s popular with the Proud Boys and Three Percenters. It is not a call to prayer, it’s a call to war. The Texas mall shooter had a “Deus Vult” tattoo, white supremacists chanted it in 2017 Charlottesville, and the Christchurch shooter had it written in his manifesto.
And JD Vance is pissed about this.
The AP did not “attack” Hegseth, or get him pulled from work that day, they were simply reporting on what happened. But why waste an opportunity to demonize underpaid journalists and play victim?
And, Pete lied when he was interviewed about it, saying it was a cross tattoo that got him pulled, when instead it was the motto.
“Just a Christian motto” might fly, if Hegseth wasn’t also, like, a big old racist and unapologetic Christian nationalist. For instance, his take on Joint Chiefs Chairman CQ Brown, asking how he got his job: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We'll never know, but always doubt — which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn't really much matter.” CQ Brown has been serving in the military since Pete Hegseth was four years old, was already more qualified than Hegseth 20 years ago, and his achievements would fill half this page.
Hegseth literally has a book called American Crusade where he opines that it’s time for an American “holy war” and complains about Muslims’ birth rates.
Will Hegseth’s nomination get pulled, will he fail to get confirmed? Or will he get confirmed anyway, because all of this is fine in MAGA land? Regardless, you can be sure that MAGA has plenty more underqualified, allegedly rapey white supremacist loyalists under the bed to choose from!
[Washington Post archive link / Vanity Fair / Media Matters]
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>> “Just a Christian motto” might fly, if Hegseth wasn’t also, like, a big old racist and unapologetic Christian nationalist. <<
I think it's also reasonable to note that it's not an inherently Christian motto. While it may be popular with Christian racists of today, "Deus vult" was first used in pagan Rome long before Christianity was a thing and referring to entirely different gods. If you poke around the internet you'll see a lot about Pope Urban # whatever being the first to say it in 1095, but honestly those two words were spoken together many times before it ever became the catchphrase of the Levantine "lebensraum" lads.
I've seen that tatt on White supremacists before. It was inked on the skin of one of the Aryan Nations skinheads along with a multitude of swastikas and other Nazi associated imagrey. Two of the vile motherfuckers were patients on my unit up at the hospital after a shooting inside of the Nazi compound.
I have had some tough assignments in my nursing career but the two weeks those skinheads, their demanding family members, repugnant fellow skinheads and a constant police presence on the unit were the WORST of my more than twenty years in scrubs.
What's coming is going to be worse.