Thoughts on the nomination of Pete Hegseth for SecDef

Outside of giving anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy and similar ignoramuses control of the government’s health policy, it’s hard to pick a Worst cabinet nomination. However Pete Hegseth is pretty damn horrific. He belongs to Douglas Wilson’s church and Wilson is a misogynist who thinks spousal rape is fine and sex can never be an “egalitarian pleasure party.” And that slut-shaming women but not men for sex is totally not a double standard.

Hegseth also believes that we should ignore the rules of war if our enemy does so because that’s the only way to win. Of course, we only WW II because we committed as much genocide as the Germans — oh, wait, we didn’t. Nor did we win the Cold War by becoming as repressive as the Soviet Union. We did bomb North Vietnam into rubble in the Vietnam War but guess what, we lost? And even after we sanctioned torture and brutal imprisonment in the Iraq occupation we lost there too. So Hegseth is full of it.

He also has a drinking problem (check out various Joe My God links here). Though the Washington Post would much sooner discuss Hunter Biden’s pardon than Hegseth’s prob lems.

Part of the appeal to Trump and Republicans is that Hegseth is virulently pro-Israel; the religious right is obsessed with Israel because their interpretation of The Book of Revelation requires Israel exist to fulfill the end times prophecies — plus a great many of them are anti-Muslim. He also sounds willing to crush military efforts to maintain diversity in favor of the kind of white supremacist militia that will do TFG’s bidding.

Still at this point his nomination hasn’t even been submitted to the Senate. Maybe TFG will drop him, maybe not. My evolving policy on covering our incoming president is to focus on what TFG’s doing, not what he says he’ll do or every idiocy that pops out of his mouth. That said, two things about The Felon picking him stand out in my mind and make it worth this post.

One is that the usual right-wing talking heads such as Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk are promising to rain down fury on any senator who oppose Trump’s pick. Bannon’s been talking tough since Trump ran in 2016, Kirk a little longer. It strikes me they’re a good example of how the powerful are often given power rather than having any. Neither Bannon nor Kirk is anything but a loudmouthed third-rate Rush Limbaugh (and Limbaugh has been forgotten since his death damn fast). I’m not sure they have much power to threaten a sitting senator but if the senator reacts as if they do—well, then they do have power.

The second is that many of the fine, moral voices of the GOP are, as usual, perfectly fine with appointing an accused rapist. Mike “biblical worldview” Johnson says everyone makes mistakes. So does Rep. Chip Roy, who says we’ve all had “indiscretions.” It reminds me a lot of when Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh and multiple Republicans and religious conservatives hand-waved the rape accusations against him away. It was a conspiracy. Blasey Ford was so ugly a stud like Kavanaugh would never have raped her. It was just two kids having fun.

As I wrote several years ago, there was no political gain in this. Trump had enough senators in his court to guarantee a right-wing, anti-abortion judge on the court. It was simply a question whether a man credibly accused of attempted rape and assault by multiple women should be on the highest court in the land. And they were fine with it because they didn’t think rape is disqualifying: “They really do think the things he’s accused of were no big: being raped, groped or assaulted is something men, in general, have a right to do. Hammer didn’t think politician Roy Moore’s alleged interest in underage girls was disqualifying, and he wasn’t alone.”

I think here we see a lot of the same thing, amped by Trump’s standing as the white man’s messiah whose commands must never be questioned.

For more discussion of rape culture and rape apologists you can check out Undead Sexist Cliches in paperback or ebook.