On Tuesday, Trump announced Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth as his new secretary of defense. The guy in the image above.
It’s not a parody; it’s from the cover of his 2020 book, American Crusade. Hegseth’s first tattoo, he says, was of a cross with a blade to represent Matthew 10:34, a cherry-picked vision of Jesus-as-warrior popular with Christian nationalists: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” On his chest he’s had inked a “Jerusalem cross”—a symbol of the crusaders’ holy war against Muslims and Jews—and on the flip side of his bicep there’s this, featured on his Instagram:
“Deus Vult,” God wills it, is more crusader kitsch—and popular with White supremacists. That doesn’t mean Hegseth’s a hater! Maybe he’s just a history buff…
Tuesday night, I had a late night drive home from Boston during which I tuned in to the BBC. They turned to former Democratic senator Doug Jones for comment on Hegseth. (No mention of the tattoos. Politics is serious!) “Unqualified,” said Jones. But, argued the BBC host—paraphrasing here, I was driving, not taking notes—he’s an Army veteran! There are nearly 16 million veterans in the US. Does the BBC think they’re all qualified for the highest military position besides the commander-in-chief?
Jones only made it worse: He said he didn’t know what Hegseth had done in the military. Which is to say, the BBC turned for comment on the top figure in the most powerful military in world history to another TV talking head who couldn’t be bothered to even look at Wikipedia?
Pete Hegseth, who has already declared his plans to clean house of “woke” generals who, he claims, only have their jobs because of “diversity,” stalled out at major.
I got home in the early a.m., too caffeinated to sleep, and too afraid to look away. I knew enough about Hegseth to understand that this is a Stephen Miller-level appointment. Full fash. So how does the New York Times report on this?
“Outside the norm.” That’s one way of putting it. But here’s how Hegseth himself describes how the US military views the man soon to be in charge of it, in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, his fourth:
But you didn’t even have to have read the book to know this about Hegseth. All you had to have done was watch Fox News—which should be a basic part of the Trumpism beat. It was on Fox that Hegseth emerged as the leading voice in defiance of the military justice system. Sam Thielman summed it up well in 2020 for Columbia Journalism Review, in which he described Hegseth’s use of his Fox pulpit to successfully lobby Trump on behalf of three military personnel charged with or convicted of, in Hegseth’s terms, “so-called war crimes”—most notoriously, Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, whose platoon mates said he stabbed to death a teenaged prisoner receiving medical care and shot a “school age” girl. (Let’s see if he gets an appointment.) Writes Sam:
I began my journalism career covering courts-martial in San Diego, and I’ve reported on Christian nationalism within the armed forces. But I’m not a military reporter. This isn’t my beat. This isn’t my story. But I can read. And that’s where I start, when I want to understand the thinking of someone who’s written—or, who knows, put their name on the cover of—a book. The Times quotes one of the book’s first pages, too, and then none of the jaw-dropping, civil war fantasy rhetoric that fills what follows. The Washington Post quotes nothing. CNN wonders whether he has sufficient administrative experience. (Is “none” sufficient?) Politico worries what the lobbyists will think.
The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
Jeff Sharlet
W. W. Norton & Company
March, 2023
I want to be careful here—I don’t think any of these journalists, some of whom, at least, are otherwise strong reporters, is secretly rooting for fascism. It’s important to distinguish between advocacy, acquiescence, and simple abdication under cover of cabinet- selection-as-court-intrigue. Many can’t—won’t—see fascist rhetoric as such because they believe, or fear, that doing so is unsophisticated. They know guys like Hegseth are grifters, that in the green room, nobody’s a Nazi. Sure, he’s intense, but it’s mostly just theater.
Just theater. As if fascism isn’t first and foremost an aesthetic; the forceful imposition of a hateful imagination on other people’s realities. File a quick hit, call it a night, tomorrow there’ll be new names over which to titter.
Me, I couldn’t sleep. So I read, and I started posting on Bluesky. I’m going to gather my gleaning here. Too tired to make real prose, what follows are just reading notes. And I didn’t get very far, though there’s more than enough already to give me bad dreams. Caffeine’s wearing off. Fascism will still be here tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…
PART ONE
The gist of new Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s book War on Warriors, per the intro, seems to be that the military is anti-White, conquered by a “diverse” “infection” intent on sabotaging the military—which would be treason. Which would, in the logic of this book, justify the self-declared “extremism” of a response he all but calls military itself.
If there’s any ambiguity about what Hegseth means by “infection,” he clears it right up:
Here is an uncommonly privileged White man named by Trump to run the military in which many, many Black, female, and queer Americans serve—as Hegseth currently does not—who have volunteered to put their lives on the line if needed, while Hegseth prattles on Fox, attacking the very soldiers, sailors, airmen (the term the Air Force uses), Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and “Guardians” (the Trump term for members of the Space Force he created) he’s set to lead. In his mind, they are the enemy. But then Hegseth, like John Wayne in The Searchers, sees savages everywhere:
Hegseth has made a Fox News career out of attacking elites, but he is an elite—a graduate of Princeton and Harvard. He knows what he’s doing here with his use of “indigenous” and “territory.” And his hatred for the “infection” doesn’t stop at bastions of liberalism such as Sodom, San Francisco, and, the Marines; it goes all the way up to any commander in chief not named Trump:
Trump’s secretary of defense—responsible for executing the orders to use the US military domestically, that Trump has said he will give, the unlawful orders he fired one of his previous defense secretaries, Mark Esper, for refusing—refers to the “left,” a category in which he includes protesters, professors, and presidents, as “domestic enemies”:
Hegseth views them—us—much as he viewed his enemies in Iraq:
And he knows just what to do:
This is not “outside the norm.” This is civil war talk.
In Hegseth’s previous book, 2022’s Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, he called for rebuilding American schools along the lines of Trump’s wildly ahistorical plan for “patriotic education,” the 1776 Report. That is, as baldly fascistic as it was in ambition, Hegseth’s vision remained political in method. The language of The War on Warriors, though, seems to indicate a belief in action beyond the political:
And the next one’s name, it appears, will be Pete Hegseth.
PART TWO, coming soon… In which an honest white man can’t get a fair shake—besides being bumped from major to secretary of defense—because “trans.”
This article was originally published on Jeff Sharlet’s newsletter, Scenes from a Slow Civil War based on his book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Read and subscribe here.
