MAGA Creeps Like Pete Hegseth Want To Be Braveheart So Bad
Yeah, we gotta talk about Pete Hegseth some more.
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So Matt Gaetz is gone, at least until he finds a way to invade our peace again. Bye, fucker! We still have a lot more unacceptable, dangerous, predatory, sick and demented Donald Trump nominees to contend with, and with the humiliating exit of Gaetz, the top priority is Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth.
Yep, we’ve got to talk about him again this week, just like we did last week.
But this is not just about him. This is also about Braveheart. But we’ll get there in a sec.
First of all, since last week’s newsletter, so much more disturbing and disgusting news has come out about Hegseth. We now have the police report from Monterey, California, in 2017, the one where a woman identified only as Jane Doe, an attendee at a California Republican women’s conference where Hegseth was speaking, says Hegseth raped her. It’s graphic. Hegseth’s lawyer is saying Hegseth has been fully cleared of those allegations, but we read the police report, and it ain’t fuckin’ say that. In fact, they recommended it be referred to the DA.
Hegseth is also defiantly insisting he’s been cleared of the allegations. Hegseth sneered at reporters yesterday as J.D. Vance was leading him around the Capitol by his dick that “as far as the media is concerned, it's very simple. The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared, and that's where I'm gonna leave it.”
As far as the media is concerned. Stop asking questions, mere reporters. The white fascist Christian man doesn’t have to answer you about the completely believable rape allegations, in the police report with all these witnesses whose accounts back up the complainant pretty much to a “T.”
(By the way, would a Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth do anything about the very real problem of sexual assault in the military? What if we told you that when he was at Princeton, while he was the publisher of the school’s conservative newspaper the Tory, he published a column that argued that having sex with an unconscious person wasn’t rape? Oh, the mosaic that’s coming together about this guy!)
In last week’s newsletter, I touched a bit on the white supremacist Christian Crusades extremist hate tattoos all over Hegseth’s chest and arms, and the way all the usual suspects are starting to blubber and caterwaul about how Y’ALL ARE ATTACKIN’ POOR PETE HEGSETH BECAUSE HE LOVES JESUS SO MUCH! As if any normal, emotionally developed human being covers their body with Crusades tattoos, or jerks off to the Crusades like it was a time when the Gospel really shone.
Politifact talked to the experts on extremism, who confirmed that yes, Hegseth’s are definitely the sorts of tattoos sported by white nationalist Christian extremists. For more on exactly the kind of Christian extremist movement Hegseth is involved in, Heath Druzin from the Idaho Capital Sun has an informative article this week.
And for more on the tattoos and what happened when the head of physical security for Hegseth’s DC National Guard unit saw them and flagged him as a possible insider threat, the Washington Post has a good article. It was a big moment in Hegseth deciding the military was now “woke,” and deciding to leave. It’s always a moment of perceived victimhood with these sorts.
Hegseth may have a prurient obsession with the Crusades, but I was reminded this week that pretty much all white conservative Christian loser weirdo dudes also have a secret and burning desire to be Braveheart.
I made an offhand joke in last week’s newsletter about Hegseth wanting to be Braveheart. Forsooth:
This loser thinks he’s Braveheart, sent by Jesus to save the military from “woke.” Fucking clown.
Said what I said.
Again, it was offhand. I was in the middle of watching it. I had seen it many years ago in high school, not long after it came out, but I didn’t remember that much about it besides Scotland, Mel Gibson and FREEEEEEDOM!
But once I started watching it again, after I was done writing the newsletter, I suddenly remembered that many if not most Bible-beating white Christian conservative dorks love to make believe in their brains that they’re Braveheart. I ended up laughing a lot during this viewing, realizing that this movie meant something entirely different to those dipshits than it does to normal people.
I decided to refresh myself on the phenomenon.
Playing Dress-Up, For BIG AND TOUGH GUYS GRRRR ARGH!
I found this article by extremism researcher and historian Kristin Du Mez, which starts with depictions of Donald Trump as Braveheart on January 6. It discusses how when Braveheart arrived in 1995, it “quickly came to inspire a renewed sense of cultural and political militancy” for conservative evangelicals. They were being victimized at the time by the existence of the Clintons, you see. Probably also the gays.
Du Mez writes about how hugely historically inaccurate the movie is — for one thing, the king William Wallace led the Scots against was very much Christian, not pagan — but in another article notes that it’s the bullshit of the movie that actually sucks in the white conservative evangelical idiots. That’s the stuff that tickles their tickle spots.
Noting that the film came out at the height of the evangelical men’s movement that brought hundreds of thousands of Christian men into stadiums for those weird Promise Keepers love-ins, Du Mez writes that Braveheart filled a bit of a different psychological need for them: “With its portrayal of warrior masculinity and no-holds-barred freedom-fighting heroism, Braveheart offered a refreshingly rugged, even ruthless alternative.”
“Warrior masculinity.” You see how these dudes get ideas in their little heads?
Du Mez continues:
It’s hard to overstate the popularity of Braveheart in evangelical circles. In 2001, John Eldredge’s bestselling Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, encouraged Christian men to model their lives after Gibson’s William Wallace. According to Eldredge, God was a warrior god and men were made in his image —“In your life you are William Wallace”—and every man had a battle to fight and a beauty to rescue.
And then came 9/11 and then every conservative men’s Bible study group was drooling over that Wild At Heart book and oh my good Lord:
Pastors played clips of the film in Sunday sermons, Christian men attended weekend Wild at Heart Boot Camps, churches organized homegrown “Braveheart Games,” and one Christian college boasted a Braveheart dorm (the film was the only R-rated film permitted).
Du Mez traces it the whole way: people yelling “Braveheart!” at Pat Buchanan in the 1990s; excitable evangelical bigot pastor Mark Driscoll using the name “William Wallace II” on his church’s message board in 2000; the Pizzagate shooter in 2016 being obsessed with the Wild At Heart book; Charlie Kirk and Jerry Falwell Jr. naming their Falkirk Center “think tank” at Liberty University after a battle in Braveheart; Ted Cruz screaming “FREEDOM!” at the 2021 CPAC.
It’s quite a lineage of weird sad loser cosplay these dorks are building. Obviously they really felt threatened when a Black man was elected president, that was a big moment for them, and it deepened their need to jerk off to Braveheart a whole bunch.
Du Mez writes that some of the other ahistorical bullshit the evangelical white dudes really love in Braveheart include how William Wallace embarks on his crusade to avenge the brutality the evil pagans inflicted on his wife (bullshit), and also the parts where the princess Isabella can’t keep herself away from William Wallace’s irresistible masculinity and must maketh romance to his hot man body immediately!
All of this is a fever dream masturbation fantasy for American white conservative men. Remember how we’ve talked about how white conservative Christians in the United States have severe Main Character Syndrome? How they’re literally unable to look at anything — including scripture — without envisioning themselves as the hero, and also the victim, but never the villain? (It goes with their Disney Princess Theology.)
Yeah, they all secretly think they’re William Wallace, at least somewhere way down deep inside, just waiting to be unlocked. You know that dog food commercial about how inside every dog exists a primal wolf?
The thing is, these idiots’ lives are so stupid, they don’t have anything real to fight for or against. Their freedom isn’t threatened. So they make up imaginary threats and then try to force us to pretend along with them that the monster under their bed is real. Preferably their imaginary boogie monster has some sort of three-letter acronym (CRT, DEI) or buzzword (“woke”) that they can scream at clouds without being forced to come up with nouns, verbs or coherent arguments.
But their entire worldview is telling them they have to be Braveheart, or in the case of Hegseth, a Crusader. (And probably also Braveheart, let’s be honest. He was in high school when it came out too.) But their lives are so droll and uninteresting and — again, importantly — threatened by nothing that is real, so they create this make-believe shit to be warriors against.
Hell, part of why it’s so easy to convince these morons that immigrants or Black people or Marxists or socialists or Antifa are their enemy is that it implies that they matter enough to have an enemy. That somebody gives enough of a shit about them to be out to get them.
Du Mez suggests that the rise of Donald Trump and the devotion he receives from conservative evangelical men makes a lot more sense in light of this Braveheart thing.
I think it explains a lot about what sickos Hegseth and a lot of other MAGA acolytes really are.
You Can Take My Life But You’ll Never Give Me PROOONOUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNS!
Remember how Hegseth is obsessed with the Crusades, and thinks he is on his own personal crusade to free the military from “woke”?
Jonathan Chait spent time recently reading Hegseth’s godawful books — specifically his most recent three, American Crusade (2020), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and The War on Warriors (2024) — and came away with the conclusion that Hegseth is, by far, Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet nomination. He wanted to find out if Hegseth would obey an illegal order from Trump to sic the military on peaceful protesters (I argued Hegseth was exactly the nominee who would do that last week). Chait concluded that Hegseth wouldn’t even wait for the order.
Chait writes that Hegseth is “sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards,” and considers everyone to the left of Trump his literal enemy. He finds in the books all of Hegseth’s masculinity and Daddy issues — not surprising for a white MAGA man with seven children — and he finds just a fuckton of whining. Waaaaaaaah, Hegseth cries constantly, nobody gives him the respect he was taught somewhere that he deserves as his birthright.
He is just a one-man white grievance factory, that Pete:
Hegseth’s demand for greater respect grows out of his belief that he personally succeeded in the face of forbidding odds. “I had been an underdog my whole life,” he writes. “I persisted. I worked my ass off.” But the woke military, he complains, doesn’t reward that kind of individual merit and grit. Instead, it has grown so obsessed with diversity that it promotes unqualified minorities and allows women in combat, reducing its effectiveness and alienating hard-working, meritorious soldiers such as, well, him. He also frets that the inclusion of women in combat erodes traditional gender norms. “How do you treat women in a combat situation,” he asks, “without eroding the basic instinct of civilization and the treatment of women in the society at large?”
Yes, please, Pete Hegseth, tell us how worried you are about “the treatment of women.” We’ll be over here reading the police report about that rape allegation again.
Chait details how Hegseth thinks the entire history of American education — yes all of it — is about communist indoctrination, and then gets into Hegseth’s beliefs about the military, how war crimes are awesome, and more:
In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)
And, Chait writes, Hegseth pretty clearly relates his feelings about war to his feelings about fighting those he considers his real enemies, AKA normal Americans like you and me. Throughout, it’s just all this tough guy roid rage meat-beating:
The clearest through line of all three books is the application of Hegseth’s wartime mentality to his struggle against domestic opponents. American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.” Are the Crusades just a metaphor? Sort of, but not really: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis—gulp—his.) […]
Battle for the American Mind likewise imagines the struggle against the communist educational plot as a military problem: “We are pinned down, caught in an enemy near ambush. The enemy has the high ground, and is shooting from concealed and fortified positions.” […]
Lest there be any ambiguity, Hegseth incessantly equates the left to wartime enemies. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy—and then total control,” he writes at one point. At another, he argues, “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military and end the war on our warriors.”
He even considered the election of Barack Obama to be an act of war. What a fucking freak.
Chris Hayes read a quote from a military official to NBC News last night, a quote about Hegseth from somebody reportedly familiar with his work. They said he “had zero leadership capability, he had his own agenda, he didn’t care what the rules were, he didn’t care what the parameters were, he was just doing what he needed to get ahead.”
We wouldn’t have expected somebody who believes the things Hegseth believes to have actually been good at his job. But we digress.
Most Dangerous Nomination, Indeed
Yep, Gaetz is gone. And Tulsi Gabbard’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nominations are still in play. But Hegseth is still the most dangerous and pressing threat.
Experts Heath Druzin talked to agree:
“Pete Hegseth is a poster child for literally everything that would be the opposite of what you would want to have for someone who’s controlling the technologically most lethal organization in the history of this country,” [said Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.] […]
Matthew D. Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, said Hegseth is “one of the most extreme far right figures ever nominated to a cabinet post, at least in modern memory.”
To be clear, this guy is a sick fuck.
His religious beliefs, and the conspiracy theories he believes are sick. It’s not some kind of normal exercise of religion thing, and no, we are not attacking him for loving Jesus too much. This man has zero Jesus in him.
Hegseth is entitled to believe whatever he believes, obviously. And if he really loves the Crusades so much, he and his likeminded jerkoffs are welcome to start a LARPing group at their local park and dress up in little costumes if it makes them feel manly. (Probably should stay at least 1,500 feet from schools, though. No telling what kind of guys would join that group.)
But the way freedom of religion works in a secular democracy — which is what we have to fight like hell to wrest back from these insurgents — is that the peaceful exercise of your religion extends all the way until it starts infringing on the rights of other American citizens.
Everything Pete Hegseth want to do to the American military, and how he would try to use it for his vile theocratic plans, is an infringement on the rights of regular American people.
And he’s not the only one. The entire theocratic Christian Nazi movement that Donald Trump and MAGA have elevated — all these socially inept Braveheart perverts and weirdos — want to do this to America. Many of Trump’s appointees are like this. It’s guys like Hegseth with Little Man Syndrome, but it’s also complete outward weenuses like Speaker Mike Johnson, who have themselves convinced that they are important patriarchs of godly families and that they’re continuing some kind of important and honorable heritage, while they spend their father/son time monitoring each other’s boners with Christian no-porning apps. It’s J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley. It’s the creeps who wrote Project 2025.
Vanity Fair reports that the rape allegation — and the fact that Hegseth didn’t tell them about it — is “rattling Trumpworld.” They aren’t sure his nomination is going to survive, or they weren’t three days ago. Then again, he was gallivanting around Capitol Hill with J.D. Vance yesterday.
We can’t let up on this one. He’s simply too vile, too dangerous, and too un-American.
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Hey I’m a leftist ally and I think it’s a great movie. I don’t think the movie depicts the king as a pagan, there is a wedding scene where they are in a cathedral. If anything it depicts the king as a homophobic monster.
There are good ideas in the film the left can use, such as, “‘men don't follow titles, they follow courage.” I wish more of our leaders had the courage of their convictions, like AOC.
Great piece Evan!
Braveheart is indeed a nasty piece of work by another nasty piece of work. Mel Gibson's icky cartoon wears its intent in bigoted sterotypes and flat-minded slogans. I saw it 30+ years ago and the thought it still repels me.