Pete Hegseth's God Is Not An Awesome God
What happens when bad people create God in their own image?
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OK, now let’s talk about that asshole Pete Hegseth again.
Yesterday, Donald Trump’s flailing loser nominee for Defense secretary was back on Capitol Hill, trying to convince senators to ignore everything they know about him. His mommy wasn’t with him, but she’s been calling senators and telling them what a precious and rambunctious boy he is, because the alpha males from MAGA town are BACK, BABY!
(This is the same Pete Hegseth’s Mommy who wrote him a scathing and detailed email in 2018, during his second divorce, talking about how he had been an “abuser of women” for years, and how she had no respect for men like that.)
His third wife was there, though.
And he told reporters that we shouldn’t all worry about all the stories we’ve heard, because here’s why:
And, frankly, the man I am today, because of my faith in my lord and savior Jesus Christ and my wife Jenny right here, I'm a different man than I was years ago." He added, “And that's a redemption story that I think a lot of Americans appreciate.”
Hahahahahaha, go fuck yourself.
This. This is why I started The Moral High Ground.
In the very first post on this site, I wrote about the sick and insidious idea that still persists in our society that white conservative Christian people — despite all evidence to the contrary — somehow are holier or more moral than the rest of us. I wrote that the white conservative Christian men and the women who prop up their patriarchy, those who are subjecting the entire universe to their histrionic temper tantrums over their loss of cultural supremacy, “are absolutely, 100 percent certain that they have sole proprietorship over The Moral High Ground. They have God on their side, they will ultimately be victorious, on earth as it is in Heaven, give us this Trump our daily bread, etc.”
I continued:
These people do not have the Moral High Ground. In fact, it’s laughable that anyone still pretends they do, in any way, shape or form. But that toxic tumor of an idea is still out there, metastasizing. Whenever it’s found, it should be mocked, ridiculed, excised, and people should make offhand comments about whether these people should be allowed to be alone with children.
I added that unfortunately, too many of us, on a societal and on a personal level, often subconsciously carry the idea that Those People actually are the Moral Majority they claim to be. That their claim to that mantle is somehow valid.
Fuck that shit, I concluded.
And now we have to listen to Pete Hegseth and his mommy and everybody else tell us how much this garbage human ghoul loves Jesus, how he recommitted his life to Christ, and we’re all supposed to absolve him the way the Lord (allegedly) did.
In a whiny op-ed he wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week, Hegseth wrote that “My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has renewed and restored my life. I am saved by his grace.”
On Fox News this week, Pete’s mommy Penelope Hegseth said, “Pete is a new person. He is redeemed, forgiven, changed.” Well, if Mommy says it!
We’re supposed to stop asking questions, because Pete and Mommy say Jesus has saved and redeemed and changed him. This is how we’re supposed to let him save his flailing nomination for a job he’s laughably not cut out for. White conservative Christian fascists are so boned up about redemption stories, and the bargain basement cheap grace that comes with them, the kind where you never become a better person, you just become more convinced of your own superiority over other people.
So that’s all they have to say, right? Click their heels together three times while saying “REDEEMED”? That’s how this works in the land of white, conservative, Christian, signed, sealed, delivered, redeemed, sanctified, sanctimonious sons of bitches, right?
Again, fuck that shit.
In fact, I’d argue that Pete’s purported newfound love for Jesus has made him a demonstrably viler, more dangerous person, and I’d suggest that the version of Jesus that Pete prays to, the one who makes footprints in the sand in the posters on his bedroom wall, is a creep, a weirdo, and a predator.
By the way, before I go on: a lot of people seem to think there is a contradiction between Mommy Hegseth’s 2018 email and her 2024 helicopter parenting of Young Peter. I see it differently. I see Mommy talking to two different audiences. You see, in the white conservative Christian paradigm, she can be angry with him privately and tell him what she really thinks of him.
But now people are threatening to deny him — and by extension their family — the power they think they deserve, by virtue of their faith and moral up-white-ness. uprightness. And they see themselves as supreme over all the people who are criticizing them. So Fierce Mommy now turns outward to protect her little rambunctious boy who can do absolutely no wrong, even when he’s being credibly accused of rape.
Watch literally any movie about white slave-owning families during the Confederacy — or anything of a related ilk — you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I Hope This Is The Last Time I Have To Write About This Bastard, Incidentally
I’ve written about Pete Hegseth three newsletters in a row, and honest to God, I’m so sick of that creep I could spit.
All the tea leaves are saying his SecDef nomination is on life support. Lindsey Graham might be preparing the waterworks to defend Hegseth and his love for beer, just like he always does when he thinks a guy he perceives as alpha is under attack. But it doesn’t look so good for Pete with the rest of the Republican senators.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal says “five to 10 Republicans” are just waiting for the right time to say fuck no to Hegseth. Senator Joni Ernst, who is on the Armed Services Committee, isn’t willing to say she’s a “yes” vote for him, which means she’s a no. Hegseth is babbling that he has Trump’s full support, but again, it’s Mommy calling senators and begging for their support, not Trump. He’s reportedly been talking to new candidates — you know just in case. (The Bulwark meanwhile reported last night that the two candidates Trump is really willing to go to bat for are Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. So that’s horrifying.)
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo thinks it’s pretty much over. Lawrence O’Donnell spent last night making fun of how Hegseth was traipsing around the Senate, not with somebody important like Senator and Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance on his arm, but with loser former senator Norm Coleman, whose name you probably had completely forgotten until I typed it just now.
When he wasn’t on Capitol Hill this week begging, Hegseth was sitting with Megyn Kelly swearing he doesn’t have a drinking problem, and also promising that if he gets to be SecDef, he’ll never drink ever again, because that’s a thing people without drinking problems say.
I hope it’s almost over. I hope this loser pulls out five minutes after I send this email, or later this morning, or this afternoon. (And if he does, then celebrate another win for the good guys by becoming a paying subscriber!)
But even if he does, this post actually won’t be out of date, because like the seas of eggs that hatch the facehuggers in the Alien movies, men like Hegseth are a metastasizing presence in our politics, and in this country, and the monster will still be very much alive, long after Hegseth fucks off out of the airlock of national prominence.
So let’s consider a couple more things about Hegseth, about his newfound redemption, and how he’s really fallen in with the wrong crowd, faith-wise.
He’s Washed In The Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!
Amanda Marcotte wrote an excellent piece about Pete Hegseth this week at Salon, about how when Mommy told Pete he needed to get help, he instead decided to join a gross, predatory and misogynistic church.
That’s where he got “redeemed.”
You see, Hegseth’s church, and his children’s school — Hegseth moved his family to Sumner County, Tennessee, near Nashville, I guess because that area is so hot with white Christian extremists these days — are both part of a movement led by Doug Wilson from Moscow, Idaho. Remember the TheoBros who love J.D. Vance so much? Wilson is their 71-year-old misogynistic tantric sex guru that we learned about in that newsletter! (Told you these creeps are all connected.)
Wilson is the one who totally agrees with Vance that parents should be able to vote on behalf of their kids, and the one who has charming beliefs about sex and women like this:
“The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
He believes, and wrote in the book where the above quote comes from, that submission from a woman is an “erotic necessity.” He also wrote that the absence of that submission makes men “dream of being rapists.” He and his wife, Nancy Wilson, believe that a husband, by definition, is never “trespassing in his own garden,” by which they mean his wife’s body.
You will perhaps not be shocked to read in Marcotte’s piece about the prevalence of sexual assault in Wilson’s church communities (Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches or CREC) and 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.
And so forth.
Are you starting to see why Pete Hegseth, fresh off a rape accusation and a second divorce, might have been attracted to this particular church’s steeple?
And then there’s all the shit about Hegseth’s prurient obsession with the Crusades, his perverted belief that that was a good part of Christian history, and his dreams, fleshed out in his books, of bringing a new series of Crusades to the United States. I wrote a bunch about all that in the last regular newsletter.
For more on that, Cathy Young has a new piece at her Substack on Hegseth’s disturbed beliefs that Americans to the left of him are the real enemy, who must be destroyed at all costs, not that he’s suggesting violence, wink wink, nudge, nudge … yet.
The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a free country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.
In her analysis of Hegseth’s books, Young incidentally finds that — surprise — Hegseth has a rather poor understanding of the Crusades, despite how much he seems to jack off to fantasies about them.
(What? A conservative Christian brainwashed by a fan-fiction version of history that never happened? THE FUCK YOU SAY.)
And of course, Young talks about his Christian extremist tattoos, as Timothy Snyder also does, and as I have before in this newsletter. The one on his bicep that says “Deus Vult” — which got him flagged as a possible extremist by his National Guard unit and disinvited from working Joe Biden’s inauguration, though Young notes that his enthusiastic defenses of the January 6 terrorists could have conceivably also played a part in that — that was a battle cry during the Crusades. He knows that. It means “God wills it.”
He ended one of his books with it, even: "See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!"
Hegseth and his ideological allies like J.D. Vance whine and bitch that “They’re just Christian tattoos!” and pretend we are attacking Christians when we criticize this poor, put-upon boy who looks like Pepé Le Pew had sex with the BP oil spill and made a love baby.
And if they are merely Christian tattoos, then they must be morally upright and we should stop asking questions, yes?
Just like we should stop asking questions because Pete and Mommy say he’s redeemed!
Fuck Off, Dork.
Pretty much every line in Pete Hegseth’s bio is a red flag, and everything I’m talking about here should start new lines of questioning, whether it’s about Pete Hegseth or the next militant Christian extremist Donald Trump hurls at the American people.
And yes, I mean militant Christian extremist. We have to get our heads out of our asses and stop pussyfooting about what this is. All too often people refer to movements like this as “American Taliban” or suggest they want to institute “Shari’a law,” as if only by drawing Muslim parallels can we adequately express the evil at hand. That, in and of itself, is evidence of what I was talking about at the top, the subconscious pass that extremist white Christian nationalism in this country gets.
If you use phrases like that, stop it. (And try to only use the Handmaid’s Tale references when they’re really appropriate. Using them with Hegseth is clearly fine.)
All of the shit in Hegseth’s worldview — the masturbatory obsession with the Crusades, the need to control women, in the military and outside of it, his long reported history of abuse of women, much of it claimed by his own mother, before she decided she was kidding — it’s all part of the same thing.
It’s all part of Hegseth’s walk with his weird, gross, masculinity-insecure version of The Lord. It’s bad.
Put differently? Pete Hegseth’s Jesus needs Jesus.
And again, this is about him, but it’s also about the next Pete Hegseth that comes along, and the one after that, and the one after that. As Lizz Winstead writes in her new Substack, this is the entire strategy of the Republican Party, to bring these sorts of men into the fold:
Recruit lost men to an extreme Christianity that has male dominance as its foundation. Offer them community and connection in churches based on a permission structure that depraved abusive behavior and misogyny is a divine right, In fact, it’s a God-given moral imperative. A structure that is so disempowering to women that it flips the script, putting all the blame onto us for acting outside these guidelines. Men didn’t make the rules, GOD DID, so what choice do men have but to rape and beat us when we don’t obey?
Deus Vult, indeed.
Not the kind of Deus any decent person would pray to, though.
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-Evan
Please also say out loud that EVEN *IF* Hegsth were completely sober, celibate and Jesus managed to fix all of his character flaws, even if he were a totally "nice guy", he is still COMPLETELY UNQUALIFIED to be SECDEF (or frankly anything other than a Fox talking head). He shouldn't be allowed within a half mile of the Pentagon he can stop campaigning the Senators for votes. Tell him it's over and to go home.
"I added that unfortunately, too many of us, on a societal and on a personal level, often subconsciously carry the idea that Those People actually are the Moral Majority they claim to be. That their claim to that mantle is somehow valid."
THIS right here is why we have such a glaringly obvious double standard in media coverage of our political parties. Why "he can be lawless, she must be flawless." It's because of the baseline assumption that Republicans = white Christian patriarchy = assumed to be perfect in every way, and Democrats = minority non-religious matriarchy = assumed to be intrinsically flawed. That's why we're always back on heels trying to justify our right to a seat at the table.
This may seem off-topic but it is really the same thing ( and I've been thinking about it lately so I'm going to make the connection)... it's why women are held to.the impossible baseline standard of "never getting pregnant unless they want to be" when the actual baseline is "pregnant on average every other year, until dead at age 32 in childbirth or of exhaustion."
Honestly, it makes me want to scream.