A PolitiSage Backgrounder on Hegseth

Hegseth is American Taliban, the guy who wants a "360-degree Holy War" to exorcise “the leftist specter.” He's Henry II and Leonid Brezhnev all rolled into one. And he's your Secretary of Defense.

There’s no specter scarier than a vengeful Donald Trump with a fistful of America’s nuclear codes—unless it’s a raging Trump with nuclear codes and a glitter of sycophantic MAGA generals and a Secretary of Defense with a brain pickled in alcohol who will do whatever Trump wants, to whomever he wants to punish. That may involve the use of military troops and surveillance against American citizens or nuclear weapons against foreign “enemies”—whether they are really enemies or not.

For the quintessential history lesson on alcohol and horrific military blunders, we need look no further than the Memoirs of Soviet Foreign Affairs wizard Andrei Gromyko (1909-1989), who served every leader of the USSR from Stalin to Andropov. It was Gromyko who witnessed the meltdown of a hyper-emotional Leonid I. Brezhnev, who, upon the assassination in Kabul of a protégé, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan while he was blind drunk.

Brezhnev, it seems, had suffered a “Becket moment.” (In)famously, England’s King Henry II (1133-1189) had grown frustrated by the insistence of Thomas Becket (1118-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, that clergy be subject only to Church law, not to English common law. After hearing of an intense outburst between Becket and members of his court, Henry—who was in a drunken rage—is alleged to have shouted, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest!”

Four men, perhaps not the most sparklingly intelligent of Henry’s lackeys, took this to mean that they should rough up said archbishop. Confronting him at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, one struck him on the shoulder with the flat of a sword and attempted to arrest him. When Becket resisted, the four butchered him, felling him with a blow to the head so vicious that it cracked his skull wide open. His brains oozed out onto the floor.

Henry was aghast. Maybe he and Thomas had turned on each other, but they had once been best friends—friends so close, it was said, they had “but one heart and one mind” between them. Henry grieved, wore sackcloth, powdered himself with ashes, and fasted for three days—but the damage was done: Becket became a saint, his slayers were sent to fight in the Crusades, and the Church’s hand was strengthened in Great Britain.

Fast-forward 800 years and find, in Kabul, two men whose fortunes in rising to the pinnacles of power in Afghanistan were as interwoven as those of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Nur Muhammad Taraki and Haifzullah Amin were, as Taraki once commented, “like nail and flesh, not separable.” They had worked for years to establish Soviet-linked socialist power in this gorgeous, fabled “Heart of Asia.” With the Saur Revolution of 1978, they achieved it: Taraki led the country; Amin was second-in-command.

In the course of their friendship, Amin, the press magician, had crafted a personality cult around his beloved friend Taraki that rivaled those of Kim Il-Sung, Idi Amin … and Donald Trump. Amin called Taraki “The Great Leader” and “The Star of the East.” The problem was, Taraki began to believe his own PR, and made the fatal mistake of slowly sidelining his friend. Camps formed around the two, and the Soviet KGB took sides. A series of tit-for-tat intrigues ensued: fake news that Taraki was going to assassinate Amin caused high government officials to seek shelter in the Soviet embassy—an attempt by Amin to intimidate Taraki by delaying his flight into Kabul enraged the head of government—an attempt by Amin to arrest Taraki was a spectacle and a failure—and an attempt by Taraki to fire Amin may have sealed Taraki’s fate.

It was then that Amin, on a trip to the Soviet Union, whined to Brezhnev, “Taraki is still around. What should I do with him?” Brezhnev left the choice to Amin, and Amin took the chairman’s reply to mean it was fine for him to kill Taraki. Which he did. On 14 September 1979, three men sent on Amin’s orders killed Nur Muhammad Taraki, suffocating him in his study. Amin became Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Afghanistan and promptly jailed 28 of Taraki’s relatives, including his wife.

But Brezhnev had promised to protect Taraki and never meant Amin to kill him. Described by Gromyko as “an emotional man easily moved to tears,” Brezhnev reeled. Gromyko: “When the news came through that (Nur Mohammed) Taraki, the general secretary of the Afghan Communist Party, had been murdered brutally in his study, it was too much for Brezhnev to bear. He was simply beside himself.” On Christmas Eve, Brezhnev, blind drunk and emotionally off the rails, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, starting the Soviet-Afghan War, the first foray of the Soviet troops beyond their borders since World War II. Three days later Amin was dead. His family was arrested and imprisoned for more than a decade.

In his memoirs, Gromyko detailed his major tension with Brezhnev—the alcoholism that plagued the Soviet peoples. Asked if Brezhnev had a drinking problem, Gromyko responded. “Yes, yes, yes.” He added, “It was perfectly obvious that the last person willing to look at this problem was the general secretary himself.”[1]

Hegseth Cometh

Nations cannot escape their leaders’ depravities and degeneracies. In Trump’s case, they are reflected in his nominees for several Cabinet positions. Virtually all the objectionable nominees have been accused of sexual abuse, and their prospective new boss, Trump, the convicted rapist, certainly doesn’t seem more than mildly annoyed by it. If sexual abuse and rape become completely normalized in this country, Trump can only benefit.

Trump wants two things only: complete loyalty and the willingness of all around him to cheerfully sell their souls to Satan to do whatever he wants without question. But apparently, the country is not completely willing to cave on that one just yet. Gaetz went down, and that was a loss, because Gaetz as attorney general would have shut down every single case against Trump, including all potential sexual assault cases still threatening him, and would have turned the most sightless of eyes as Trump rolls out Project 2025, fat as it is with unconstitutional potentials its creators hope Trump will illegally institute by fiat.

“Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” – Pete Hegseth

Yet Gaetz was never Trump’s most dangerous nominee. That dishonor goes to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense—leader of the world’s most powerful and lethal military—whom whistleblowers accuse of gross financial malfeasance, bullying, belligerence, bigotry towards and hatred of Muslims and everything “Woke,” and alcohol-soaked rages, serial sexual abuse, and rape.

For the record, the Trump team was furious to learn that Hegseth had settled out of court with a woman who accused him of a rape that may have involved a date-rape drug. Apparently, Hegseth just “forgot” to mention the NDA-bound payoff. But the rest—the serial sexual abuse, financial malfeasance, and frequent drunkenness leading to profound misconduct—are ones the Trump team knew about. How bad is all this? Writes The New Yorker:

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 (VFF) and Concerned Veterans for America (CVA)—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.[2]

Every problem drinker has a unique “signature” of personality disorders that accompanies a binge. His “signature” appears to include serial sexual assault, drinking to unconsciousness, and staggeringly poor judgment. Examples, but the tip of a very large iceberg, as cited by The New Yorker include:

• Hegseth took co-workers to a strip club and got so inebriated he tried to join strippers onstage and had to be restrained by co-workers. That same evening, he allegedly tried to assault a female member of his own staff in the club.

• A complaint from a co-worker in 2015 says the married Hegseth and other male members of his management team at CVA divided up women employees into categories of “party girls” and “not party girls” and sexually pursued female staffers, creating a hideously toxic work environment for CVA’s women.

• A separate complaint from 2015, made by a different employee, states that in the “early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio” (for CVA) Hegseth, drunk again, chanted “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”[3]

Then there’s Hegseth’s serial binge-drunkenness at Fox News. To get the story, Rolling Stone interviewed three current and seven former colleagues at Fox, who told them:

• He was so drunk at the wedding of a Fox producer he could hardly stand.

• He’d arrive for his early morning broadcast either smelling of alcohol or hung over, and he was so often drunk that he had to be “babysat” by Fox staff who knew he’d have been out drinking the night before.

• Once, at 10:00 a.m., he drank ten warm, stale beers that had been left out from a display.[4]

Given such evidence of a major drinking problem, Senate Armed Services Committee member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) summed up why Hegseth must not be confirmed:

“Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure. It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”[5]

Today what we are hearing, on one side, is that Trump and Vance—obviously having done some serious arm-twisting in the last few days—are confident they’ll get Hegseth through. On the other side, Blumenthal is saying he’ll be surprised if we’re still talking about Hegseth next week:

“The power of the presidency, not to mention this president-elect, and what the retribution might be, I think, is pretty daunting, and so I think Republicans are reluctant to step forward and be the first one, but I think privately, they’re much readier to advise the president that the better part of wisdom would be to urge withdrawal of this nomination.”

What’s really happening, Blumenthal is saying, is that half a dozen or more Republican senators are “waiting for the right moment to say no.”[6]

Why Would Trump Fight So Hard for This Drunken, Abusive Bigot?

This is a Jerusalem Cross. Hegseth has one tattoed on a pectoral muscle. He’s been known to whip off his shirt and brandish it as a signal of where he’s really at. This cross, known as a potent, has variously represented Christ and the Four Apostles and The Wounds of Christ (head, both hands and both feet). It also represents the evangelicism the aim of which is the spread of Christianity to all the ends of the earth. It was a symbol used by the Knights Templar who fought the Crusades. In current rightist American culture IT IS A SYMBOL OF WHITE SUPREMACY.

Well, why Trump is so hot for Hegseth is because he’ll carry out the American civil war through which Project 2025 writers hope to bring down liberals, non-Whites, women, and non-Christians. Hegseth has already, literally, written the book on using the U.S. military against the civilian Liberal population of the United States when Trump begins his “Retribution Tour” to punish the Woke Folk.

And, wouldn’t you know, there’s a Christian cult behind his views. And while it’s fairly comical watching a drunken abuser like Hegseth invoke the name of Jesus—rather like watching Jimmy Swaggart blubber and bleat to Jesus on national TV after he was caught with a prostitute—Hegseth’s willingness to use the U.S. military against U.S. civilians, which is as unconstitutional as it gets, to invoke a conservative Christian state by civil war is no laughing matter. Trump would order it, and Hegseth would absolutely do it, and this time, we’ll have no General Mattis to stand between us and the loss of the country—and to stand up to Trump.

“The Christian ISIS” War at Home and Abroad

Based on numerous public statements and writings, it’s likely he will aim to undermine the military’s long-standing nonpartisan pluralism by scrubbing diversity from the ranks, banning women in combat, urging the military to choose sides in a “civil war” against “domestic enemies” on the left. He has invoked the need for “a 360-degree holy war” to exorcise “the leftist specter dominating education, religion and culture.”

Also on the home front, The Guardian Writes:

[Hegseth] explicitly supports forms of election-rigging through gerrymandering. Fair electoral boundaries, he writes, amount to “Playing nice to placate the so-called middle,” which “has been a losing strategy for patriots for decades”. Since “the other side is stacked with enemies of freedom”, Hegseth argues, “Republican legislatures should draw congressional lines that advantage pro-freedom candidates – and screw Democrats.”

A Drunk with God on His Side: Hegseth and Far-Right Christianity

As it often is, it’s Politico that uncovered Hegseth’s potentially deadly association with one of the most radical of all the reformed evangelical denominations:

Two years ago, he moved his family from New Jersey to Tennessee, where Hegseth joined a school and church associated with reformed reconstructionism, an ideology helmed by the far-right theologian Doug Wilson.

Wilson’s denomination opposes religious pluralism and embraces the idea of a nation founded on the premise that Jesus Christ is the “lord of all.” He has written that owning slaves in biblical times was not antithetical to being a Christian and, while he says he rejects racism, he has asserted that “the system of slave-holding in the South was far more humane than that of ancient Rome, although it still fell short of the biblical requirements for it.”

Wilson, himself a former submarine navigator for the Navy, has also described himself as philosophically “indebted” to Robert L. Dabney, the military chaplain to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson who defended slavery and believed in white supremacy.

He claims border defense and Christian dominance are divine conflicts, and claims God has deemed women and children legitimate military targets in such affairs. “The word of God,” Wilson preaches, “tells Christian soldiers what to do, even if Christian soldiers are in the service of an unbelieving magistrate.”

There’s also a system of church courts that metes out punishments for heresy. “They think the Bible applies to every area of life, and they want to see that made into law,” explained Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida. “In that sense, they are not unlike the Taliban.”[7]

The American Taliban State

If Trump is able to force through Hegseth’s confirmation, Hegseth’s statements and hatred of Muslims, hatred of liberals, and choice of a religious orientation that is solidly white supremacist and Christofascist and excuses slavery indicate that the U. S. military will be in the hands of the crafters of Project 2025, with whom he wholeheartedly agrees and who wish to make America “a Christian nation.”

And Hegseth’s drinking, I predict, will continue and no one will care. Because Pete Hegseth will not make a single decision. Project 2025 authors, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, on behalf of Vladimir Putin, will make every decision and Pete Hegseth will rubber-stamp their every whim and have a drink.

And at some point, power that has corrupted completely will escape the confines of the nation and strike out at the world as the Jerusalem Cross on Hegseth’s chest foretells. And then this country will reap the whirlwind, just as did the rash drunken Henry II and the blubbering, drunken Leonid Brezhnev, whose blunder in starting the Soviet-Afghan War in 1979 resulted in the harboring of Osama bin Laden and his attack on America, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Afghans, and the enslavement of three generations of Afghan women. And the United States will be led by the same kind of stupid, uneducated, bigoted males who think have God on their side. They are indistinguishable from the Taliban.

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[1] From NewsDay in LA Times Archives: “Afghan Slaying Spurred Invasion, He Says : Gromyko Calls Brezhnev a Problem Drinker.” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-04-04-mn-958-story.html

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[3] Ibid.

[4] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pete-hegseth-alcohol-abuse-allegations-1235193884/

[5] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[6] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5024462-blumenthal-republican-senators-hegseth/

[7] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/06/pete-hegseth-defense-religion-christian-00192117