Pete Hegseth Takes Turn Defiling The Very Act Of Prayer
If Almighty God ever does jerk-off motions, He certainly is doing so right now, Almightily.
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OK, now let’s talk about gross old Pete Hegseth.
I don’t think I’ve ever laughed out loud at the first two words of a person’s prayer, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard Pete Hegseth slur his way through a begging session with God, so it stands to reason.
“KING JESUS!”
Oh good Lord. He addresses God the same way he snivels before anyone he views as a white Christian male authority figure he’s supposed to be subservient to. He sounds basically the same talking to Donald Trump, even if he hasn’t addressed Trump as “King Trump” in public so far, that we know of. (In private, I don’t even want to know.)
So I guess this is going to be a series now, white fascist Christian Trump officials debasing the act of prayer itself with their performative, performance-enhanced prayers to a God who has never met them. White House Nazi Barbie Karoline Leavitt — who carries the demeanor of the girl in your church you hated most, the one who was always trying to “win” Vacation Bible School — had one recently, where she prayed for the Instagram/Twitter cameras that she would have “fun” while she told her vile lies to the American people. And she did! She did have fun that day!
Praises be, under His eye!
Now it’s Pete Hegseth’s turn, because if there’s anybody in the Trump administration with a sicko yet totally bullshit Christian nationalist religious faith that drives his actions and gives him a (false) sense of purpose in life, it’s old Secretary Shitfaced. If there’s anybody with a KA-CHING! (and also bullshit) story about how everything changed when he re-centered his life on Christ and now his sins have been washed as white as show, it’s that fuckin’ bastard. (You know how hard white conservative Christians get for redemption stories that absolve them of all responsibility for their actions in heaven and also on earth!)
So let’s talk about the gross white Christian nationalist prayer service Pete led this week at the Pentagon, where they referred to Donald Trump as divinely appointed.
The New York Times lede cuts right to the point:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth led a Christian prayer service in the Pentagon’s auditorium on Wednesday morning, during working hours, in which President Trump was praised as a divinely appointed leader.
Because that’s what the American military needs from its leader! Less expertise, more school-sponsored licking of Donald Trump’s sack during Wednesday morning chapel service!
(If you went to a Christian school growing up, you know of which I speak.)
Brooks Potteiger, Pete’s pastor at his creepy church in Tennessee, gave the sermon. He was the one who referred to Donald Trump as “sovereignly appointed.” Yes, Trump, the 34-times-convicted felon who a judge explained was indeed found by a jury to be liable for rape, but don’t worry, in the eyes of upright Christian Nazi men, Trump’s sins don’t count.
Potteiger said, “We pray for our leaders who you have sovereignly appointed — for President Trump, thank you for the way that you have used him to bring stability and moral clarity to our land. And we pray that you would continue to protect him, bless him, give him great wisdom.”
Based on the excerpts from Potteiger’s sermon CNN quoted, we can see why a relatively unaccomplished military guy like Pete Hegseth, whose only qualifications for running the Pentagon are that the president loved him on Fox News, and he seems to have a lot of the same masculine insecurities as the president, would like him. Dumb shit like this:
“Our Lord, Jesus said in Matthew 10, not a sparrow will fall to the ground apart from my heavenly Father. If our Lord is sovereign, even over the sparrows’ fallings, you can be assured that he is sovereign over everything else that falls in this world, including Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles, including strategy meetings and war room debriefings. Jesus has the final say over all of it.”
Jesus’s big missiles go PEW PEW PEW!
Christ, what a fucking dork.
Pete also glugged some Handmaid’s Tale shit into the microphone, with the self-assuredness of a man who thinks his weirdo version of Christianity gives him some kind of moral authority:
“This is precisely where I need to be, and I think exactly where we need to be as a nation, at this moment,” Mr. Hegseth, standing at a lectern bearing the seal of the Defense Department, said in his opening remarks: “in prayer, on bended knee recognizing the providence of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” He added, “Knowing that there’s an author in heaven overseeing all of this, who’s underwritten all of it, for us, on the cross, gives me the strength to proceed.”
If Almighty God ever does jerk-off motions, He certainly is doing so right now, Almightily.
Anyway, Pete says these little unconstitutional love-ins for Army Daddy Bear Jesus will be happening monthly. At the Pentagon. Yep.
Pete’s church, where he worships under the careful direction of that hairy dildo in the picture above, is near Nashville, and is called Pilgrims Hill Reformed Fellowship. If you’re new here, you need to remember that any time you see the word “Reformed,” you should run the other direction immediately. Some of the biggest sickos in the Christian nationalist fundamentalist movement march under the banner of “reformed.” (Think “reformed” = “predestination,” which means we’re in the realm of Calvinist theology where everything that has ever or will ever happen has been foreordained since time immemorial, and surprise! These white son of a bitch Christian nationalists are a very important part of God’s plans! According to them!)
Pilgrims Hill is affiliated with the CREC — Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — which we have discussed here on this newsletter a few times. It’s kind of a less intellectual/brainy, more outwardly batshit version of the crop of conservative Presbyterian churches that have become so popular these days among white American fascists. More on that in a second.
As with many CREC/Theobro figures we’ve encountered — and all the ones who staff his church (that’s a funny link, lots of things there to make you laugh) — you can see above that Pastor Potteiger has a performative beard that absolutely screams, “I’m a gay lumberjack! Wait! No! That’s not what my beard means! Shut up, all you queers!”
Remember the Theobros? You’ve met them. Several times.
As clownish as they are, these are profoundly disturbed people with profoundly sick beliefs. This is the church, and the denomination, where Pete found his “redemption.” They’re extremely misogynistic, which fits like a glove for an insecure conservative white man like Hegseth, one whose desperation to eliminate DEI is likely born out of a psychological need to make disappear all the non-white, non-straight, non-man people who are clearly better than him in every way, those who remind him what a loser he really is.
This is the movement led by the creep Doug Wilson, who’s transformed Moscow, Idaho, into some kind of predatory Christian nationalist wasteland, who once wrote in a book that “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Also that submission from women is an “erotic necessity” for men. (If anybody ever says that to you, you call the cops.)
As we discussed before Pete’s confirmation, using an excellent piece by Amanda Marcotte as a source, you might not be shocked to learn about the reported prevalence of sexual assault in Wilson’s CREC and its affiliated schools (Association of Classical Christian Schools or ACCS).
Podcaster Peter Bell and social media manager Sarah Bader have been producing a podcast about Wilson and the culture of abuse at CREC churches and ACCS schools, titled "Sons of Patriarchy." They've recorded a seemingly endless number of interviews with people who witnessed or survived sexual abuse or domestic violence — and documenting the unwillingness of CREC leaders to take it seriously. Bader told Salon women are told they are "accountable for all of their husband's sins" and that Wilson just "rewrapped rape as 'submission.'" Students at ACCS schools who said they were sexually abused by teachers reported being blamed for causing the older men to "stumble." Women say they've been blamed for being raped, for husbands who abuse alcohol and for men's infidelity.
That’s where Pete Hegseth went to get “redeemed” after he was (credibly) accused of rape, and around the same time got divorced for the second time.
Why put in the hard work to become a better man when you can just get a church to put its stamp on all your trashiness and call it redeemed, saved and sanctified?
All of this is what Hegseth is bringing into the Pentagon, and into his prayer service.
And obviously, Pete’s big Pentagon prayer orgy for WARFIGHTER GRRR ARGH JESUS is part of the totally unsubtle Christian fascist takeover of the US government that is a hallmark of Trump 2.0. We’ve discussed recently how “anti-Christian bias” task forces and snitch lines are popping up all over the government like whack-a-mole, witch-hunting for people who don’t view Christian Nazis and fascists and their theologies as superior to everyone else.
As it happens, Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo has a new article this week on Doug Wilson expanding his influence in Trump’s Christian nationalist DC. He’s reportedly met with Secretary Shitfaced recently, when he went to visit and preach at Pete’s and Potteiger’s church near Nashville. Wilson is even opening a new church in DC. Read all about what he calls his “mission to Babylon” here!
TPM has this quote from the Pentagon spox:
“The Secretary is a proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which was founded by Pastor Doug Wilson,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell told TPM when asked about Wilson’s claim that he had met Hegseth earlier this month. “The Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”
The teachings about how men have to dominate women sexually, or the ones about how “sodomy is worse than slavery”? Or maybe these things Wilson once wrote?
"Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since," Wilson wrote in his 1996 defense of Confederate slave owners, "Southern Slavery As It Was." "There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world," he continued, painting slavery as an Edenic paradise for those captured in it. "Slave life was to [the slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes and good medical care."
Please advise, Sean Parnell!
Go back and read past newsletters I’ve linked to, to refresh yourself on more of Wilson’s sick beliefs, and also Hegseth’s sick beliefs, including his prurient obsession with (his limited and frankly wrong historical understanding of) the Crusades. These are militant Christian extremists, and they are dangerous.
And as anyone could have predicted, Hegseth is hard at work institutionalizing that in the Pentagon, which is supposed to be part of the government for all of us. (He would probably tell you this will make the troops tougher, something something WARFIGHTERS GRRR ARGH! And then all the troops in earshot would roll their eyes the way they always do when Pete says “warfighter.” (In fact, if you want a fun weekend pastime, read all the military Reddits to see what they actually say about Pete Hegseth.)
Who will be the next Trump administration creep to get caught on camera praying with tongues as sharp as a serpent’s, the poison of vipers on their lips? It could be any of them, or it could be Karoline Leavitt or this fucking dipshit again.
Guess we’ll just have to call them out and mock them as they come.
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They are so far from Jesus that it hurts my soul every time I hear them mention his name. They would hate his Holy Woke self and all he stands for. This White Male Fragility cult is outrageous. I hope I live long enought to see them all fall and end up in jail.
"If Almighty God ever does jerk-off motions, He certainly is doing so right now, Almightily."
*giggle snort*