So, here we are dealing with the soon-to-be Commander-in-Chief’s picks to head our most important federal agencies. Donald Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy at Health and Human Services, a man who has ignored major medical studies to convince the American people that crucial childhood vaccines cause autism. Someone who has distorted science to misinform us about COVID-19 and vilify those who were/are fighting it. Donald Trump wants Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Apart from his womanizing, alcohol problem, and accused sexual assault, he is a dreadful administrator. Most problematic of all, Hegseth, as you will soon learn, seems intent on fighting a war, not against foreign threats, but against those he regards as domestic enemies. His Us versus Our Us.
As for me, I haven’t thought of Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep in the longest time, but as I read Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin’s “Battle for the American Mind,” I couldn’t help but think of David Copperfield, who, in a never-ending act of manipulation, insists again and again how humble he is.
Here’s Uriah and David Copperfield:
‘I suppose you are quite a great lawyer?’ I said, after looking at him for some time.
‘Me, Master Copperfield?’ said Uriah. ‘Oh, no! I’m a very umble person …
“I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,’ said Uriah Heep, modestly; ‘let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father’s former calling was umble. He was a sexton.’
‘What is he now?’ I asked.
‘He is a partaker of glory at present, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah Heep. ‘But we have much to be thankful for. How much have I to be thankful for in living with Mr. Wickfield! … Since a year after my father’s death. How much have I to be thankful for, in that! How much have I to be thankful for, in Mr. Wickfield’s kind intention to give me my articles, which would otherwise not lay within the umble means of mother and self!’
‘Then, when your articled time is over, you’ll be a regular lawyer, I suppose?’ said I.
‘With the blessing of Providence, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah.
‘Perhaps you’ll be a partner in Mr. Wickfield’s business, one of these days,’ I said, to make myself agreeable; ‘and it will be Wickfield and Heep, or Heep late Wickfield.’
‘Oh no, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah, shaking his head, ‘I am much too umble for that!’
There is nothing like false humility—especially when conflated with exaggerated piety. And so we have Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s choice to head the military of the most powerful nation in the world.
During his stint as a star of Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News propaganda machine, Pete Hegseth wrote several books that reveal what he might bring to the job. In “Battle for the American Mind,” he tells us to turn to Christian values to better educate ourselves, our neighbors, and especially our children. Channeling Uriah, Hegseth offers a potent mix of humble confession. Compelled, I am guessing, to admit much of what we are soon to discover for ourselves. Hegseth has sinned so often that he is, in fact, insufficient and broken. I am guessing, in the MAGA scheme of things, these admissions are all pluses if you are counting on getting significant praise for your soon-to-be-confirmed redemption:
I can’t imagine a more Heep-ish claim than this:
Our humility about the past is what informs our hope for the future. If anything, we cannot think of two people less worthy to write this book. Our own winding paths inform the future we want for our kids — wiser choices, more intentional personal formation, and Christ at the center in the classroom. Not to mention the future we want for our country. We both stumbled our way to the mission of this book, and today hope that others will find their bearings sooner, saving our providential Republic in the process.
Could it be a bit of a presumptuous stretch for the failed and fallen and unworthy Pete Hegseth to believe he could successfully motivate the rest of us to reorient the way we live, transform what we believe, and change how we teach our children? Exactly how successful has he been in making those “wiser choices”?
I am just guessing here, but could acknowledging “brokenness” and owning the “failed and fallen vessels” description be the more polite MAGA way of not quite owning but hinting at sin? Especially the Ten Commandments kind of sin.
Luckily, we still have a working press, and, not surprisingly, Donald Trump’s decision to send Pete Hegseth to the Senate to win confirmation for one of the most powerful jobs in the universe has unleashed a torrent of evidence of a multitude of his transgressions.
For Pete Hegseth, confession is combined with pontificating. Yes, he deserves credit for acknowledging the brokenness and stumbling, but do we need the almost lethal dose of moral superiority? He is far too comfortable telling us what we are doing wrong, then even more comfortable suggesting and prescribing what we need to do to live more Christian lives.
In a short essay for the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank that champions “free enterprise, limited government, personal responsibility and government accountability,” Hegseth nimbly uses his own failures to quickly focus on the rest of society—and, not surprisingly, the poor. As for family breakdown:
No amount of social policy — whether abstinence-only sex education, curbing no-fault divorce laws, or marital tax benefits — can replace a father being a father, a mother being a mother, and both striving to have a healthy marriage. A mother and father are the people who make the change needed to avoid the splintering of families. Policies can serve as a powerful reinforcement to values that already exist but won’t prevent the family breakdown our eroding values have wrought.
As for “a father being a father … striving to have a healthy marriage”:
What am I missing? Somehow “having been raised in a family where faith, fidelity, and fatherhood” were valued didn’t seem to dissuade Hegseth’s infidelity, nor prevent his failed marriages, or fathering a child out of wedlock. And does “ultimate” wife mean he finally got the model that was meant to be?
Am I being too cynical to imagine that despite his great confidence in what he has to tell us about “a father being a father, a mother being a mother, and both striving to have a healthy marriage,” his own redemption requires some serious revitalization.
In fact, Hegseth has always had a problem living up to the standards he sets for the rest of us. As the UK Independent points out, his hypocrisy is not new:
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Defense secretary married Meredith Schwarz in 2004, according to Vanity Fair. That was after they were voted ‘most likely to marry’ in 1999 at Forest Lake Area High School in the Minneapolis suburbs. Hegseth moved on to Princeton, where he wrote a column for the conservative Princeton Tory, sharing his views disdainful of feminism and LGBT+ rights. ‘By advocating government support of the traditional family unit, a return of the acceptability of the “homemaker” vocation, freedom from oppressive government oversight, moral responsibility, and the revival of religious faith, conservatives provide a working blueprint for a free and prosperous future,’ he wrote in 2002.
Schwarz filed for divorce in 2008 after Hegseth admitted infidelity, according to Vanity Fair, citing four sources close to Schwarz and Hegseth. APM Reports previously reported that the cheating was listed as grounds for the split during divorce proceedings. ‘She was gaslighted by him heavily throughout their relationship,’ one source told Vanity Fair. ‘As far as everyone else was concerned, they were viewed by many as this all-American power couple that were making big things for themselves.’
NEWS: According to sources, @PeteHegseth admitted to his first wife that he had had *five* affairs during their 4 year marriagehttps://t.co/S5YPBRzUfq
— Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) December 3, 2024
If ever there was a presidential administration in desperate need of the longest-lasting version of redemption, it is this revised version of Trumpovia. Together, with Kennedy, Gabard, Patel, and Hegseth to name a few co-conspirators, they seem intent on stumbling us toward multiple disasters. But it is so very par for the Trumpian course that self-accountability evaporates in the face of someone to blame. I have called this column “Pete Hegseth — defending Us from Us” because it doesn’t take long for Pete Hegseth to decide that there is an Us and there is an Us, which really is Them. Having never been blessed, I imagine that it is one of the great virtues of heightened religiosity that, with a minimal amount of prayer and a smidgeon of repentance, you somehow get to assume the mantel of righteousness and the right to smite your enemies. What was it exactly that was required of our soon-to-be president but a bullet whizzing by his ear? That, I assume, enabled him to assert he had survived by the Grace of God (what does it say about those who perished) then allowed him to sell his now officially blessed $60 published-in-China Trump Bibles without any visible guilt.
It doesn’t take much for Hegseth, as he battles for the “American Mind,” to pivot from his own brokenness to our greater brokenness. And if you have been watching MAGA, especially since the days of Charlottesville, I doubt you will be surprised to learn from Hegseth that it is race—their race and those too anxious to counsel inclusion—that plays a big part in this. Quite simply, there is something wrong with the miseducated new America:
Seemingly out of nowhere — and accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020 — concepts like white privilege and systemic racism and even a new founding date for America, the year 1619, were splashed across computer screens all over America. Critical race theory had fully arrived (often masked as ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’), along with a full-on attempt to redefine gender, infuse climate fatalism, and turn our children into activists. These types of revelations were powerful because they were not the result of media exposure, but instead a bottom-up, and often apolitical, recognition by parents that the very foundation of American education had taken a radical turn.
It was the ‘woke’ versus the newly awake. You might call it the COVID-(16)19 effect … in fact, many parents, teachers, and administrators seem numb — or resigned — to the inevitability of these radical new concepts … This is the way it is. This is the future, parents were told. Get with the program! White people are inherently oppressive. Gender is completely fluid. Climate change will destroy the world. And America is the ultimate source of evil in the world. Up is down, left is right, good and evil are subjective — until an educator tells you who or what is good and evil, and then you must comply.
[Emphasis added.]
For someone who imagines himself qualified to counsel us all about education in America, he seems to have slept through American history. How has Hegseth managed to miss the central role slavery has played in our history? By mocking and replacing a serious critique with nonsense like the nonexistent claim that “white people are inherently oppressive,” he gives himself a pass. He has no need to reckon with the stubborn and resolute determination of our white American founders—even the most pious amongst them—to accept the inhumane proposition that the Black people who came to this country in chains and were then sold in the marketplace deserved their enslavement. He is not even slightly appalled that even in the face of a determined, if minority, movement to emancipate the slaves—and a civil war that tore us apart—America managed to live with slavery’s successor, segregation. You think maybe that would account for why many calculate we have been marked by and still suffer from “white privilege” and “systemic racism”? If you ask me, Pete Hegseth has clearly disqualified himself as a voice of reason when it comes to fixing American education.
So here we are: Donald Trump and Hegseth himself imagine he is competent enough to head the world’s most lethal fighting force and save and defend our providential republic. If I were given to prayer, I would be praying full time that Trump and Hegseth don’t impulsively surrender to the desire to rain our nuclear arsenal down on those they imagine to be our enemies and, while pretending to be pious, end life on Earth as we know it.
Sadly, as we will soon see, Hegseth is already at war, and like the resentful man who has nominated him, he is convinced the ones we need to vanquish are the enemies within. Yes, he has already compared these enemies of his with the truly despicable authoritarians who actually are our foes. Is it too paranoid to worry that Hegseth might want to launch short-range missiles to take out the sanctuary cities and woke communities and universities that haunt him?
Back to “Battle for the American Mind,” where Pete Hegseth informs us that the perfidy of progressive American education is akin to the evil enforced by sociopathic Kim Jong Un on the hapless North Koreans:
[I]n June 2021 a North Korean defector, Yeonmi Park — turned Columbia University graduate — went even further, saying of the state of Ivy League education, ‘Even North Korea is not this nuts.’ She continued with a dire warning, saying the United States’ future ‘is as bleak as North Korea’ unless our self-loathing education system is overhauled.
Think about that! A North Korean defector — who experienced the most brutal, repressive, and anti-American regime in the world until she was thirteen years old — believes our elite schools are even more nuts than North Korea. That should be a wake-up call. The condemnation of dissent may look different — North Korea prefers concentration camps, America prefers cancellation, marginalization, and labeling — but the reality is the same: America’s elites are hell-bent on changing the landscape in America, one incoming freshman class at a time — and they are succeeding. In America today, private thoughts are not allowed to translate into public speech, provoking the question, Are we really free? Are our kids?
Really, Pete Hegseth, “labelling” compares with forced labor camps? And starvation? It is merely a matter of appearance? Imagine Secretary of Defense Hegseth sharing this nonsense with the South Koreans. Or the Ukrainians now having to fight Putin-imported North Korean fighters.
In “American Crusade,” Pete Hegseth shifts his focus to attack those resistant to MAGA and Christian nationalism:
Hegseth knows how to pour it on, summoning an excess of righteous indignation for what the others are doing to his America. Quite the pivot from the humble exercise of sharing his stumbles. A remarkable summoning of hubris mixed with stupidity. How has advocating for healthcare for all, demanding policing that precludes choking Black people to death, and teaching a faithful account of the long-term trauma of slavery and segregation translate to “erasing America’s soul, culture and institutions”?
His is a venomous vision. Charged by a grandiose confidence, allowing for not the slightest doubt that he is absolutely right, he imagines himself a Christian crusader, convinced of the utter evil of those he so wants to slay:
So how about we hold up a mirror to Pete Hegseth? How Christian is he really? How profound is his redemption? Could there be deeper wounds than those he admits to that provoke such utter rage, such a need to demonize? What injuries have triggered such egregious “stumbling”?
On November 16, 2024, The Washington Post reported:
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer Saturday and other documents obtained … The statement came after a detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. The person who sent the memo to the transition team did not respond to requests for comment from The Post. According to the memo, Jane Doe ‘didn’t remember anything until she was in Hegseth’s hotel room and then stumbling to find her hotel room.’
The Washington Post followed up on this story on November 21, 2024:
She told police that she hazily recalled Hegseth taking her phone and blocking the door as she tried to leave … She recalled saying no a lot. Four days after the alleged assault, she went to a hospital and asked for a rape exam. She said that she thought someone might have slipped a drug into her drink and sexually assaulted her. She brought in the clothes she’d worn that night. According to the police report, she had developed an infection that could have resulted from a new sexual partner … The nurse was legally required to report the incident to the police, who opened a criminal investigation. At that point, the alleged victim identified her assaulter as Hegseth.
Remember these are allegations. But here is the link to the 22-page report released by The Monterey Police following a California Public Records Act request from Mediaite:
In the December 1, 2024, edition of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer describes an entirely new set of stumbles to the Hegseth story:
A whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job. After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense …
But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran — Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America — in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct …
Regarding the Veterans for Freedom, Mayer writes:
[T]he finances of V.F.F. grew so dire that the group’s donors hatched a plan to take control away from Hegseth. The donors’ representatives hired a forensic accountant to review the books. The findings were appalling. In January, 2009, Hegseth sent a letter to the donors admitting that, as of that day, the group had less than a thousand dollars in the bank and $434,833 in unpaid bills. The group also had run up credit-card debts of as much as seventy-five thousand dollars. Hegseth said that he took full responsibility for the mess, but added that, unless the donors gave him more funds, V.F.F. would have to file for bankruptcy and close down …
Margaret Hoover, a Republican political commentator and political strategist who worked as an adviser to V.F.F. between 2008 and 2010, recently told CNN that she had grave concerns about Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon, the largest department in the federal government, given his mismanagement at V.F.F. ‘I watched him run an organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors. The organization ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.’ Hoover stressed that V.F.F. was an exceedingly small organization, with fewer than ten employees, and a budget of between five million and ten million dollars. She told CNN, ‘And he couldn’t do that properly—I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-seven-billion-dollar budget and three million individuals’ …
[Emphasis added.]
Mayer continues:
A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity — to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report — which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015 — states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’ In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety … In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting ‘Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!’ … In January, 2016, Hegseth resigned from Concerned Veterans for America, under pressure …
Mayer writes:
I spoke at length with two people who identified themselves as having contributed to the whistle-blower report. One of them said of Hegseth, ‘I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,’ adding, ‘When those of us who worked at C.V.A. heard he was being considered for SecDef, it wasn’t “No,” it was “Hell No!”’ …
‘There’s a long pattern, over more than a decade, of malfeasance, financial mismanagement, and sexual impropriety,’ Hegseth’s former associate told me. ‘There’s a fair dose of bullying and misinformation, too.’
Mayer’s reporting continues:
It was as a celebrated veteran and weekend Fox News contributor that Hegseth appeared in October, 2017, as a dinner speaker at the California Federation of Republican Women’s fortieth biennial convention, in Monterey, California. His personal life was in tumult. In 2010, he had married a second time, to Samantha Deering, a co-worker at Vets for Freedom. He admitted in an essay that year that he had fathered a child ‘out of wedlock’ before marrying her, the Times reported. Then, in August, 2017, while still married to Deering, he fathered a daughter with another woman, a producer at Fox, Jennifer Rauchet, whom he eventually married, in 2019. As he and Deering wrangled through a difficult divorce, as the Times first reported, his mother, Penelope Hegseth, sent him an e-mail excoriating him as ‘an abuser of women’ who ‘belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.
I want to take a moment to reflect on the great emphasis Pete Hegseth has put on family values and his repeated contention that contemporary society—so influenced by woke culture—has failed to uphold those values. I realize that as her son comes ever so closer to succeeding and holding a position and power beyond their wildest dreams, his mother has explained away her profound condemnation of his behavior. But how significant is it that she couldn’t help but express at that time how appalled she was by how he treated his wife and the mother of his children.
The New York Times writes: “Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years …” Here is a portion of the email obtained by The New York Times.
The article continues:
Mrs. Hegseth, in a phone interview with The New York Times on Friday, said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email ‘in anger, with emotion’ at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce. In the interview, she defended her son and disavowed the sentiments she had expressed in the initial email about his character and treatment of women. ‘It is not true. It has never been true,’ she said. She added: ‘I know my son. He is a good father, husband.’ She said that publishing the contents of the first email was ‘disgusting.’
There is something a bit incendiary about the zeal of the sinner turned missionary. Mike Baker and Ruth Graham of The New York Times write about “Pete Hegseth and His ‘Battle Cry’ for a New Christian Crusade”:
Before Donald J. Trump picked him to lead the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth spoke often about a medieval military campaign that he saw as a model for today: the Crusades, in which Christian warriors from Western Europe embarked on ruthless missions to wrest control of Jerusalem and other areas under Muslim rule. As he embraced a combative brand of Christianity in recent years, he wrote that people who enjoy the benefits of Western civilization should ‘thank a Crusader.’ On his arm, he has a tattoo with the words ‘Deus Vult,’ which he has described as a ‘battle cry’ of the Crusades. ‘Voting is a weapon, but it’s not enough’ he wrote in a book, ‘American Crusade,’ published in May 2020. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.’ …
Baker and Graham continue:
The far right has also embraced crusader iconography and language with increasing openness, including at the Unite the Right rally, a white supremacist gathering, in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 and at the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A lawyer for Mr. Hegseth, Timothy C. Parlatore, said that crusader symbols are common among military veterans like Mr. Hegseth, who served at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the display of crusader symbols by some white supremacists did not mean that Mr. Hegseth intended that meaning.
Mr. Hegseth grew up in a Christian home. Even so, he told a Christian magazine in Nashville last year that he underwent a religious transformation in 2018, in his late 30s, when he and his current wife, Jennifer Hegseth, began attending Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey … Mr. Hegseth and his family moved to the Nashville area about two years ago, a decision he has said was based on their desire to send their children to Jonathan Edwards Classical Academy, a Christian school founded in 2009. Classical education, in which classrooms focus primarily on the Western canon, has become a fast-growing movement among conservatives who are wary of secular public schools.
In Tennessee, the Hegseth family joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small church opened in 2021 as part of the growing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho; his religious empire now includes a college, a classical school network, a publishing house, a podcast network and multiple churches, among other entities. Mr. Wilson is a self-described Christian nationalist, which he defined in an interview with The Times as someone who sees that ‘secular nationalism doesn’t work,’ and who wants to limit the power of the government to impose restrictions on Christians …
The governing documents of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches include a statement that women should not ‘be mustered for combat.’ (Mr. Hegseth has also said that he does not believe women should serve in combat roles.) The church reserves leadership positions for men and asserts that men are the heads of their households, views shared by many theologically conservative churches. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Wilson said he had never met or communicated with Mr. Hegseth but expressed enthusiasm about the prospect of his leadership of the Defense Department. ‘I would hope Pete Hegseth would be a disrupter of the Pentagon’s way of doing things,’ Mr. Wilson said. ‘I would like to see a rebuilt military that’s far more lethal and a lot smaller.’ …
Mr. Hegseth has written that while the Crusades were filled with injustice and unspeakable tragedy, the alternative would have been ‘horrific,’ because it is Western civilization that has nurtured the values of ‘freedom’ and ‘equal justice.’ His writings warn of the growing presence of the Muslim faith in the West, and urge Americans to work on issues such as education, media and law to protect Christian values.
I find it difficult to square Pete Hegseth’s commitment to “freedom” and “equal justice” with what he has written in “American Crusade.”
In case you are wondering what became of the all-too-humble Uriah Heep, here is the short answer from Wikipedia:
working for Mr. Wickfield … Uriah encourages Wickfield’s drinking, tricks him into thinking he has committed financial wrongdoing while drunk, and blackmails him into making Uriah a partner in his law office. He admits to David (whom he hates) that he intends to manipulate Agnes into marrying him. Uriah miscalculates when he hires Mr. Micawber as a clerk, assuming Micawber will never risk his own financial security by exposing Uriah’s transgressions. Yet Micawber is honest, and he, David, and Tommy Traddles confront Uriah with proof of his frauds. They let Uriah go free only after he has (reluctantly) agreed to resign his position and return the money that he has stolen. Later in the novel, David encounters Uriah for the last time. In prison for bank fraud and awaiting transportation, Uriah acts like a repentant model prisoner. However, in conversation with David, he reveals himself to remain full of malice.
So much for too easily earned repentance.
As for the drink, Newsweek writes:
Among the controversies, Hegseth, a veteran and conservative commentator, has faced allegations of excessive drinking, including on the job when he worked at Fox News. Hegseth has vowed to ‘fight like hell’ for the position and pledged to quit drinking alcohol if he is confirmed by the Senate.
Although in recent days Hegseth has denied that he has had a problem with excessive drinking, he has in the past talked about turning to alcohol after returning home from deployment in Iraq. In an August 2021 appearance on The Will Cain Show podcast, Hegseth said: ‘I’d look around at 10 o’clock and be like, “What am I going to do today? How about I drink some beers? How about I go have some lunch and have some beers? How about I meet my one or two buddies and have some beers?”’
‘And one beer leads to many, leads to self-medication, leads to “I’ve earned this.” Like, “don’t tell me I can’t,” he said.
When Cain asked Hegseth if he drank heavily after returning from combat, Hegseth said: ‘Oh yeah.’
By the way, 10 U.S. Code § 113 requires our Secretary of Defense to implement our National Defense Strategy:
I am not sure Donald Trump has picked the right man for this mission. There is not a word about formulating the strategy necessary to defeat progressive education, the liberal media, the woke agenda, diversity programs in the U.S. military, and weeding out the leftist rot.
