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hegseth 2

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see xian natl FASCISM

see press suppression

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not spec ops; war crimes in his unit;

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omg

New reporting based on a leaked briefing memo from a recent meeting between high-level officials at the Department of Homeland Security and Defense Department sparked fresh warnings on Saturday about the Trump administration's internal plans to increase its domestic use of the U.S. military.

According to Greg Sargent of The New Republic, which obtained the memo, the document "suggests that Trump's use of the military for domestic law enforcement on immigration could soon get worse."

The "terrifying" memo—which the outlet recreated and published online with certain redactions that concealed operational and personnel details—"provides a glimpse into the thinking of top officials as they seek to involve the Defense Department more deeply in these domestic operations, and it has unnerved experts who believe it portends a frightening escalation."

Circulated internally among top Trump officials, TNR reports the memo was authored by Philip Hegseth, the younger brother of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The younger sibling, though lesser known by the public than his controversial brother, currently serves as a senior adviser to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and acts as DHS liaison officer to the Pentagon.

The meeting between DoD and DHS officials and the memo centers on Philip Hegseth's push for closer collaboration between the two departments, especially with regard to operations on the ground, like those that happened earlier this year in Los Angeles when National Guard units and later U.S. Marines were deployed in the city to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and local law enforcement put down local protests sparked by raids targeting immigrants and workers.

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As Sargent noted in a social media post:

Strikingly, the memo says straightforwardly that what happened in Los Angeles is the sort of operation that may be necessary "for years to come." As one expert told me: "They see Los Angeles as a model to be replicated."

"To Make America Safe Again, DHS and DoD will need to be in lockstep with each other, and I hope today sets the scene for where our partnership is headed," states the memo, which also compares transnational criminal gangs and drug cartels to Al Qaeda.

Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, was among the experts TNR spoke with who called that comparison particularly worrying. "The conflation of a low-level threat like transnational criminal organizations with Al Qaeda, which was actually attempting to topple the United States government, is a clear attempt to use excessive force for a purpose normally handled by civil authorities," said Cohn.

Sociology professor Kim Lane Scheppele, a scholar who studies the rise of autocracy at Princeton University, was among those who raised alarm in response to the published reporting and the contents of the memo.

"Here it comes," wrote Kim Lane Scheppele. "The worst we've been waiting for."

According to TNR:

The memo outlines the itinerary for a July 21 meeting between senior DHS and Pentagon officials, with the goal of better coordinating the agencies' activities in "defense of the homeland." It details goals that Philip Hegseth hopes to accomplish in the meeting and outlines points he wants DHS officials to impress on Pentagon attendees.Participants listed comprise the very top levels of both agencies, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and several of his top advisers, Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine, and NORTHCOM Commander Gregory Guillot. Staff include Phil Hegseth and acting ICE commissioner Todd Lyons.

"Due to the sensitive nature of the meeting, minimal written policy or background information can be provided in this briefing memo," the memo says.

Joseph Nunn, counsel for the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told TNR it was "disturbing to see DHS officials pressuring the U.S. military to turn its focus inward even further." Nunn added that the memo suggests that "military involvement in domestic civilian law enforcement" is set to become "more common" if the policy recommendations put forth by Phillip Hegseth take hold.

Following publication of his reporting, Sargent said he wanted to flag something specific for readers.

"It looks plausible that the Hegseth brothers are trying to push military leaders further on involving military in domestic law enforcement," he noted. "Two experts I spoke with read the memo that way. There may be a bigger story here to get."

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READ MORE: ‘Vindictive Erasure’: Hegseth Ripped for Pride Month Order to Rename USNS Harvey Milk

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TRUMP RAMBLE WEST PT SP? AN 5 25

Franklin Graham scores Pentagon Christian prayer services invitation

David Badash

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AN 5 25

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has pledged to do his part in making the Trump administration the most transparent in history, issued a memo Friday imposing tight restrictions on reporters' movements at the Pentagon in an apparent bid to crack down on leaks.

Under the new policy, which takes effect immediately, journalists are prohibited from entering many locations across the Pentagon building unless they're accompanied by Trump administration personnel—restrictions that Hegseth claims are necessary to protect national security.

"If press require access to other areas/offices within the Pentagon for 'in-person' interviews (or other engagements), they are required to be formally escorted to and from those respective offices by authorized DoD personnel from those specific offices/Agencies/Military Departments," Hegseth's two-page memo states.

Reporters covering the Pentagon will also be "required to complete an updated in-briefing form explaining their responsibilities to protect" classified and "sensitive" information.

"Failure by any member of the resident or visiting press to comply with these control measures will result in further restrictions and possibly revocation of press credentials," reads the memo.

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"The Pentagon is making it harder for journalists to do their jobs and easier for power to go unchecked."

The restrictions come in the wake of several scandals that have personally implicated Hegseth, including the revelation that he used a private group chat that included members of his family and his personal attorney to discuss plans for a U.S. attack on Yemen. They also come amid a broader Trump administration assault on press freedom.

The Pentagon Press Association (PPA), which represents journalists covering the U.S. military, said in a statement that Hegseth's memo "appears to be a direct attack on the freedom of the press and America's right to know what the military is doing."

Kevin Baron, a founding officer of the PPA, said he is "angry and frustrated—but not surprised—that MAGA propaganda-loving conspiracy theorists like SecDef Hegseth and his team have dropped this JDAM-sized attack on the press."

"It's un-American," Baron added. "It's dangerous."

National Press Club president Mike Balsamo echoed the PPA's criticism of the new policy, which he said represents a "stark departure from longstanding norms that balanced operational security with meaningful press access."

"By blocking access to common areas, restricting movement without escorts, and complicating basic reporting functions," said Balsamo, "the Pentagon is making it harder for journalists to do their jobs and easier for power to go unchecked."

Hegseth announced the press policy changes as the U.S. military is poised to receive a $1 trillion budget for the coming fiscal year despite mountains of evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars to line the pockets of military contractors. Late last year, the Pentagon failed its seventh consecutive audit.

The American military is involved in conflicts around the world, and the Trump administration—with Hegseth's vocal support—has eased restrictions on U.S. airstrikes and raids outside of "conventional war zones."

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'Lying again': Hegseth ripped for ending 'woke Biden initiative' Trump signed into law

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On Friday night, February 21, the Pentagon was rocked by a major bombshell when President Donald Trump fired Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump, on his Truth Social platform, announced that he was "nominating Air Force Lieutenant General Dan 'Razin' Caine" as a replacement.

Trump, despite having fired Brown, didn't say anything insulting about him in the Truth Social post. The president wrote, "I want to thank General Charles 'CQ' Brown for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family."

Trump did, however, insult former President Joe Biden in his post, writing, "Despite being highly qualified and respected to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the previous administration, General Caine was passed over for promotion by Sleepy Joe Biden. But not anymore! Alongside Secretary Pete Hegseth, General Caine and our military will restore peace through strength, put America First, and rebuild our military."

READ MORE:From 'American Apocalypse' to 'Golden Age': Behind Trumpworld's dramatic narrative shift

The purge was detailed in Tom Nichol's "A Friday Night Massacre at the Pentagon.'

The firing of Brown also inspired a great deal of reactions on X.com, formerly Twitter.

Democratic consultant David Axelrod tweeted, "So the president who dodged the draft with 'bone spurs' fires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — a decorated fighter pilot and Four-Star General — because he's not a 'warfighter?'"

Journalist Tara O'Grady, formerly of KTVN Channel 2 News in Las Vegas, wrote, "Trump fires top military leaders in unprecedented shakeup. The Friday night terminations include Chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. C.Q. Brown. The firings are so Trump can replace them with Generals that will place loyalty to him over loyalty to the Constitution."

O'Grady also said of Trump, "He's taking control of the military so he can eventually use them against American citizens."

READ MORE:'Tax Elon!' Irate crowd shouts down GOP congressman during town hall in deep-red county

CNN's Anderson Cooper noted Rahm Emanuel's reaction, posting, "'I think it's very, very reckless'" Former Ambassador to Japan and WH chief of staff @RahmEmanuel reacts to President Trump firing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General CQ Brown, his top military adviser."

Gopal Sengupta, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, tweeted, "Trump fires senior military leadership in unprecedented Pentagon purge. The president fired Joint Chiefs chairman moments before his defense secretary fired the Navy chief and others."

U.S. Marine Corps veteran Jurgen Blick commented, "Trump you are starting to show your colors. I bet trump you haven't got a clue how hard this General worked to get where he saw your lies."

Gavin Barrett, a law professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, commented, "Trump’s political purge of potential opposition spreads to the military Trump/Hegseth -fire the top US military officer for political reasons. -fire the top military lawyers for political reasons. -fire thousands of civilian staff (as a start)."

Politico's Paul McLeary posted, "WIPED OUT: Trump gutted the Joint Chiefs Friday night, firing Chairman Gen. CQ Brown - while he was visiting troops in Texas - and @SecDef said he will also replace Navy Adm. Lisa Franchetti and UASF vice chief Gen. James Slife."

Democratic activist/content creator Harry Sisson wrote, "Donald Trump just fired Joint Chiefs Chairman CQ Brown and provided no reason for doing so. This is part of Trump’s attempt to purge the military of anyone who isn’t loyal to MAGA. Absolute insanity."

Former Pentagon official Chris Meagher tweeted, "Sad day for America. Trump fired CQ Brown and several other proven warfighters and leaders of the US military. Glad to join @kaitlancollins to discuss what our country will be losing in Chairman Brown - a calm, prepared, focused mil advisor on critical natl security matters."

Political strategist Chris D. Jackson lamented, "BREAKING: President Trump just fired Joint Chiefs Chairman CQ Brown—no reason given. That’s another highly qualified African American official ousted, only to be replaced by a white guy. This is what "America First" looks like? So sad."

READ MORE: 'Unacceptable misconduct': Trump DOJ files official complaint against Biden-appointed judge

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Last month, U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who has on rare occasions stood up to Donald Trump, cast the deciding—and, to some, unexpected—vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Now, a report reveals that Tillis says the FBI had informed him of “credible” death threats before his vote. This revelation has led some to question whether he voted under duress, while others accuse him, and other Republicans, of caving to pressure.

“In private,” Vanity Fair‘s Gabriel Sherman reports, “Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.”

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former Trump official told Sherman.

“Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about ‘credible death threats’ when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary,” Sherman reported. “According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. (When asked for comment for this story, a spokesperson for Tillis said it was false that the senator had recommended the book in that capacity. The FBI said it had no comment.)”

READ MORE: Musk’s Cuts Now ‘Hobbling’ Major Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Research Facility: Report

In his article at Vanity Fair, Sherman serves up numerous other examples detailing the threats of violence Republican lawmakers have allegedly been facing. On social media, he writes, “GOP Senators and House members are scared of being murdered by Trump supporters if they don’t support Trump. This is fascism in America.”

It’s not the first death threat Tillis received, and some critics say that if Senators can’t do the job they were elected to do, and swore an oath to perform, they should quit.

Some responded to this post from Sherman:

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“I was also scared for my life when I came forward with harassment allegations against Fox News’ Roger Ailes —- but I still did the right thing. Courage isn’t easy. Most Republicans still need to figure that out,” wrote former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, who became one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World.

John Jackson is a veteran and former Republican who says he fought in Ukraine for nine months, thanks in part from motivation he got from Ronald Reagan.

“There are millions of children in Ukraine who go to school under missile attacks, daily,” Jackson wrote, in response to Sherman’s social media post. “They are far braver than our politicians. If U.S. Senators aren’t willing to risk life and limb to perform their Constitutional duties, they should resign.”

“This is exactly what Trump was counting on when he pardoned everyone for the 6 January insurrection,” noted Jonathan Z. Ludwig, an Associate Professor of Russian at Oklahoma State University.

Others responded to the article in general.

Tim Marksman, an editor for Wired, writes that “there are a lot of legislators, academics, activists, journalists, medical workers etc. who follow their conscience in their work despite death threats and despite not having the protections afforded members of Congress.”

“I have long believed that not enough has been written about how GOP members have felt physically intimidated by Trump supporters,” noted attorney George Conway. “It doesn’t excuse their cowardice, but it still deserves more attention.”

READ MORE: ‘Chamberlain’ Trump Sparks International Condemnation: ‘First Anti-American US President’

Senator Tillis’s vote to confirm came after an event that had given Hegseth’s critics hope he would not be confirmed.

“Before Senator Thom Tillis voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, he worked with accusers to make the case against him in a bid to get G.O.P. leaders to scrap the vote altogether,” The New York Times reported last week, noting how Hegseth’s nomination had been “teetering on the brink of defeat on the Senate floor.”

“Turning to a group of North Carolina lawmakers who were flying with him to survey storm damage in their state, Mr. Trump noted Mr. Tillis’s impending defection and posed a question: Which of them wanted his endorsement for a primary challenge to the senator next year?” the Times added.

“Tillis personally assured Danielle Hegseth in a call on Jan. 19, witnessed by two other people, that if she signed the statement testifying that she believed her former brother-in-law Pete Hegseth has an alcohol abuse problem and was abusive to his second wife, it would carry weight, and potentially move three votes-his own, along with the votes of Sens. Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska),” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Tillis voted to confirm. Two weeks later, in a rare social media post, the Republican Senator from North Carolina proudly posted photos of his impending trip with the President aboard Air Force One:

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A federal judge sharply criticized an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice over Pentagon policy asserting that the U.S. Armed Forces could somehow be compromised simply by requiring service members to use a colleague’s preferred pronoun.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee, appeared skeptical of both the President’s and the Department of Justice’s stance on transgender service members during Tuesday’s hearing.

Reyes “asserted flatly that the idea that the greatest fighting force in the history of the world would be adversely effected by the need to use specific pronouns for a few thousand members of the military is, ‘Ridiculous,'” Fox News producer Jake Gibson reported.

READ MORE: ‘Bloodbath by Design’: Trump’s Russia Negotiators Criticized for ‘Almost No Experience’

According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, this is how the exchange went:

“REYES: Can we agree that the greatest fighting force… is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1 percent of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them?

DOJ ATTORNEY: I can’t agree with that here.

REYES: Would you agree with me that if our military is negatively impacted in any kind of way that matters… We all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use. We have a military that is incompetent. Any common sense rational human being knows that it doesn’t. It is pretext. It is frankly ridiculous. If you want to get me an officer of the U.S. military who is willing to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage the U.S. military is less prepared because of pronoun usage. I will be the first to give you a box of cigars.”

An estimated 15,000 service members are transgender.

In another striking exchange, Judge Reyes also called Trump’s executive order on transgender service members “unadulterated animus.”

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Currently, the Pentagon has ordered service branches to stop accepting new transgender recruits into the military, and to pause any gender-affirming medical care for transgender troops.

READ MORE: ‘Sociopathic’: USAID Worker Sues Alleging State Dept. Medevac Refusal for Pregnant Wife

“One of the plaintiffs,” in the case, WUSA9‘s Jordan Fischer reports, “Koda Nature, a 23-year-old transgender man from Texas, said he had been working with a recruiter to join the U.S. Marine Corps when he was informed last month he would no longer be able to enlist. Nature said joining the military had been his dream since he was 5 years old – a dream to follow in the footsteps of 17 generations of his family.”

President Donald Trump has signed at least four executive orders restricting the civil rights of transgender people in the United States, including one that could be used to ban open service by transgender troops, under the guise of prioritizing military excellence, readiness, and “unit cohesion” — tropes that for decades were also used to try to prevent lesbian, gay, and bisexual troops from serving openly in America’s armed forces.

“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” Trump’s January 27 executive order reads. Trump also alleged that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

That order specifically targeted the use of preferred pronouns, which he called, “invented and identification-based pronoun usage.”

“It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity. This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.”

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FAIL

SEV AN NOT HERE

2 13 25 trump talks to putin fo 90 min war crim invite to US, he to russia

vuln to flattery, putin ex kgb handler

no nato crimea

'Palpable harm': Hegseth slammed for 'screwup' of 'biggest foreign policy issue'

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RWW

02/14/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

After New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on federal criminal charges in September, the man soon embraced Donald Trump in an overt attempt to get the president to overturn his case. As Manhattan federal prosecutors readied to bring the bombshell indictment charging the mayor with destroying evidence and instructing people to lie to the FBI, Trump’s Justice Department issued an order to drop the case, a letter obtained by The New York Times reveals.

The Department of Justice allegedly dropped the charges against Adams in exchange for his cooperation in Donald Trump’s immigration plans.

Project 2025 was clear: First, purge federal workers. Then replace them with theocrats and fanatics.

The Trump administration’s decision to delete a DOJ database of cases against Capitol riot defendants places those who seek to preserve the historical record in direct opposition to their own government.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth invited conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec to travel with him on his first overseas trip this week to visit European allies, scooped the Washington Post on Thursday.

Faith Life Church began as a small basement Bible study 30 years ago led by founders Gary and Drenda Keesee. It opened its New Albany megachurch in 2008, according to the Faith Life website. It is now part of a criminal investigation into accusations of sexual abuse.

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ay que lastima

an 2 25

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) to serve as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence. Republican senators almost unanimously voted for Gabbard despite unified Democratic opposition, with a final vote tally of 52-48.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who was the Senate Republican leader for nearly two decades and a former member of the "Gang of Six" that gets classified intelligence briefings, was the lone dissenter among his party. After casting his "no" vote with Democrats, McConnell ripped Gabbard over her "history of alarming lapses in judgment."

"The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is a key participant in the process that informs every major national security decision the President makes. The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and manages the classification and declassification of our nation's most sensitive secrets," he stated. "In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust."

READ MORE:'Email Putin all our war plans': Experts blast Trump for picking 'Russian spy' Gabbard as intel chief

Multiple Democratic elected officials also tore into their GOP colleagues over their decision to be a rubber stamp for Trump. On Bluesky, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) wrote that Gabbard amplified "propaganda" for Russian President Vladimir Putin and deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad for years. Anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project tweeted that Russia refers to Gabbard as "Putin's girlfriend." And Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) slammed Republicans as "worse than useless" for confirming "Tulsi F—ing Gabbard."

"Confirming her as DNI serves only to tell Trump that Senate Rs would rather lick his boots than do a single damn thing to protect our national security," he tweeted. "They are worse than useless. And they are putting every American at risk."

Around the same time Gabbard was confirmed, Fox News liberal host Jessica Tarlov tweeted a video of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (also one of her former Fox News colleagues) calling for Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula — which Russia has been illegally occupying since 2014 — to be considered Russian territory. Hegseth added that Ukraine shouldn't be considered for membership in the NATO alliance anytime soon.

"Tulsi confirmed at virtually the same time," Tarlov wrote. "A sunny day in Moscow even if's still only 19 degrees out."

READ MORE:'She lied to us': Ex-Gabbard staffers speak out about 'insane' meeting with Syrian dictator

Software engineer Alex Cole wrly noted on Bluesky that Gabbard — who was once the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee — has found far greater political success after abandoning the Democratic Party.

"Tulsi Gabbard was once on a government watchlist. Now she’s running U.S. intelligence," Cole wrote. "Moral of the story? If at first you don’t succeed, just switch political parties."

Gabbard's alleged closeness to Russia didn't go unnoticed by MSNBC columnist Brandon Friedman. He recalled a time when social media platform Instagram announced it was going dark in Russia on March 13, 2022. He then posted a screenshot of a March 23, 2022 Fox News interview with Gabbard where the former congresswoman complained that her Instagram video views had dropped from 250,000 to 300,000 to just 15,000, suggesting that Russian Instagram users were the main source of her traffic. Friedman called that complaint "the funniest thing" Gabbard said.

Former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob took a more somber tone, writing: "No foreign country in its right mind will share sensitive intelligence with Tulsi Gabbard. We are now a country that's flying blind in a dangerous world."

READ MORE:Ex-GOP congressman explains why Trump's Gabbard pick is 'perplexing and dangerous'

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2x? DN xian nat’l

Apocalypse Now: Extreme interpretation of Christian nationalism now guides Pentagon policy - Alternet.org

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Constitutional scholars warn of 'limited options' if Trump defies courts: 'More force at his disposal’

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'He's building a concentration camp': Fears grow as images emerge of offshore prison at Gitmo

'Small but important win': Court blocks Trump from sending some immigrants to Guantanamo

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MMA

Trump is trying to throttle the free press — and U.S. moguls are going along with it

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 02/04/25

President Donald Trump is wasting no time in carrying out his goal of throttling the free press. Over the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency, his appointees have wielded federal regulatory authority to punish outlets the president dislikes — and American media moguls are responding with submission.

Trump has turned standard conservative attacks on journalists into one of the hallmarks of his political agenda.

He takes as his model Hungary’s autocrat Viktor Orban, who has “effectively dismantled the news media in his country” as “a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an ‘illiberal democracy,’” as New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger noted in an extraordinary warning last year.

During his first term in office, Trump repeatedly tried to leverage state power against his despised “fake news,” and together with his Project 2025 allies has developed a playbook to attack, defund, and delegitimize news outlets in his second.

Major media companies began signaling before Trump took office that they were willing to play ball with his administration in order to preserve their business interests. But since Inauguration Day, as Trump’s appointees have begun showing their intentions, executives at several news outlets have gone into full retreat.

CBS News preps for a Trump settlement

In the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump denounced CBS News’ editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris as “the biggest scandal in broadcast history” and declared that CBS should be stripped of its broadcast license. But in addition to invective and threats, Trump also filed a lawsuit against the outlet for producing journalism which displeased him.

The suit, which alleged that CBS airing different portions of Harris’ answer to a question in different venues constituted “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference,” drew derision from First Amendment attorneys, who described its legal theory to CNN as “ridiculous junk” and “a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”

But over the past few weeks, reports have indicated that CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, may be preparing to settle the suit with Trump. Such a settlement would be “an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation,” as The New York Times put it.

But Paramount needs federal approval for its proposed merger with Skydance Media, the production company founded by filmmaker David Ellison, and apparently sees giving the president a payoff as a valid way to smooth the path. Pressure for the settlement is coming from top Paramount shareholder Shari Redstone, the Times reported, who “stands to clear billions of dollars on the sale of Paramount.”

LA Times’ biotech industry owner goes all-in for RFK Jr.}:

Billionaire doctor Patrick Soon-Shiong once drew plaudits for using a small fraction of the vast fortune he made in the biotech industry to purchase and sustain his hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.

But Soon-Shiong’s involvement in the paper’s operations has become more heavy-handed since the final months of the presidential campaign, with the owner repeatedly weighing in on Trump’s behalf. Over the past few weeks, Soon-Shiong, whose medical patents are subject to federal oversight, has begun cheerleading for the confirmation of the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.

“‘I truly believe [Kennedy] has the American public's best interests at heart,’ Soon-Shiong tweeted Tuesday in a post he pinned to the top of his account on X, formerly Twitter, for much of last week,” NPR reported. “It was one of 18 messages promoting Kennedy that Soon-Shiong — a billionaire surgeon and medical inventor — posted over the course of four days, which included Kennedy's confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill.”

Soon-Shiong’s support for Kennedy appears to have bled into his paper’s operations as well. On Friday, an op-ed contributor accused the paper of deceptively editing the piece he submitted in order to remove his criticisms of Kennedy’s nomination.

Journalists at CNN regularly drew vicious attacks from Trump and his supporters during the president’s first term. During a tone-setting press conference shortly before he took office, Trump lashed out at then-White House correspondent Jim Acosta as “fake news” and “terrible.” And Trump’s salvos at the network went beyond just words — his Justice Department tried to block a merger involving CNN’s then-parent company..

This time, CNN’s corporate leadership appears less willing to leave the network vulnerable to Trumpian retribution. Network chief Mark Thompson led an editorial meeting the day before Inauguration Day in which he instructed CNN talent “to be forward-thinking and to avoid pre-judging Trump” and to avoid “expressing any outrage of their own” or “relitigat[ing] the past,” former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy reported in his Status newsletter.

As for Acosta, he left CNN last week rather than accept Thompson’s offer to anchor the network’s coverage from midnight to 2 a.m. ET.

The tip of the president’s anti-press spear is Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission whom Trump elevated to chair. Carr authored Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC and has notably refused to reject Trump’s repeated calls for the commission to yank the licenses of broadcast networks whose reporting he dislikes.

Following his promotion, Carr sent a letter to Bob Iger, the CEO of ABC parent company Disney, in which he denounced the network for having “contributed” to the “erosion in public trust” and pointedly referenced the FCC’s regulatory power.

Carr also restored a right-wing group’s bias complaints targeting NBC, CBS, and ABC for purportedly biased coverage of the presidential campaign, which his predecessor had dismissed. In response to the CBS complaint, the FCC demanded that CBS News provide the unedited transcript and tapes of Harris’ 60 Minutes interview, adding government pressure to the benefit of Trump’s private lawsuit. The network ultimately submitted to what one legal expert described as a “highly partisan intervention” with “no historical antecedent.”

And on Wednesday, Carr announced a new FCC probe of underwriting announcements produced by NPR and PBS, “with an eye toward unraveling federal funding for all public broadcasting.”

The Pentagon announced Friday night that the defense correspondents at NBC News, The New York Times, Politico, and National Public Radio are all required to vacate their dedicated workspaces. Their spots will instead go to the right-wing One America News Network, New York Post, and Breitbart — and theoretically to the progressive HuffPost, which does not have a Pentagon reporter and did not request space.

The move came a week after the Senate confirmed former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.

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Take Trumpist threats to jail journalists seriously

:{09/23/24

Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook to crush the free press in a second term}:

:{10/29/24

“Fake News Networks”: Trump and Project 2025’s goal to attack, defund, and delegitimize the press}:

10/16/24

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Despite Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's narrow confirmation in the U.S. Senate, MAGA could still harbor a grudge against the three Senate Republicans who voted down President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Pentagon.

According to Sen. Tammy Duckworth (R-Ill.), both her fellow colleagues and Hegseth's ex-wife have been the target of Trump supporters' rage. Duckworth — an Iraq War combat veteran — told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that Hegseth's opponents have come under a "torrent" and a "deluge" of attacks by the far right. While Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is also a military veteran, signaled she may vote against Hegseth, she ultimately voted in favor of his confirmation.

"Joni Ernst received so many threats and attacks outright, you know, threatening her, saying that they would primary her all the way through to threats against her own security," Duckworth said.

READ MORE:**'Acted like the rules didn't apply': Hegseth's coworkers say he often showed up drunk on set**

"Pete Hegseth's second wife, you know, lives in fear. She has young children... She's under a [non-disclosure agreement]. She had to have a safe word because she was so afraid of him," she continued. "If you talk to sexual assault survivors, domestic violence survivors, they are terrified. And they're not going to speak out against their abusers."

While Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) announced earlier this week they would be voting against the confirmation of the Fox News part-time weekend host, former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joined his two Republican colleagues on Friday. Duckworth told Maddow that while she was glad there were "at least three Republicans who have put the well-being of our nation above themselves," she lamented that Hegseth was the first defense secretary in U.S. history to have needed a tie-breaking vote from the vice president to be confirmed.

"The last company that he ran... he so badly bungled their finances, they had to bring in a forensic accountant to figure out what he did with the $10 million budget, and now they're going to put him in charge of a $900 billion Pentagon budget," Duckworth said. "It's a sad day for our nation, I fear for the military. I fear for our national security."

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RWW

01/23/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Last week, Richard Rogers of the America First Policy Institute appeared on "The Jim Bakker Show," where he reported that the Trump administration would be appointing a "faith director" to serve under every Cabinet member who would be tasked with ensuring that anti-Christian policies are not enacted.

IFrame Content

On Wednesday, Christian nationalist worship leader and right-wing political activist Sean Feucht posted a video in which he reported something similar, claiming that the Trump administration intends to assign a "government-sanctioned intercessor" to every Cabinet member who will be responsible for praying for them and shaping their decisions.

Returning from the inauguration, Feucht complained again about the remarks delivered by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde at the National Prayer Service held at the Washington National Cathedral before bragging that he had been invited to hold worship services inside the Pentagon by Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth and inside the U.S. Capitol by House Speaker Mike Johnson.

But that was only the beginning.

"I can't wait to tell you guys the God connections," Feucht marveled. "Mind boggling. I got invited to do worship at the Pentagon with my friend Pete Hegseth. I got invited by Speaker Mike Johnson to go into the Capitol and worship. I mean, it's crazy guys."

"It's wide open, right now," he continued. "Our government has people in it now—I've never seen this and never heard of this before—where worship is being invited in and the Trump team actually has a faith department where every Cabinet member has almost like an intercessor, like a government-sanctioned intercessor, that's responsible to pray and integrate faith and prayer and decision making into every facet of the government."

"It's absolutely unprecedented.," Feucht rejoiced.

Video URL

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It is unclear if the "faith director" positions mentioned by Rogers are the same as the "government-sanctioned intercessor" positions mentioned by Feucht, but either way, this is further evidence of the deep influence of dominionist and Christian nationalist activists within the MAGA movement as well as the impact that institutions like the America First Policy Institute are already having on the federal government under Trump.

rww

01/16/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Georgia State Senator Colton Moore (R) was arrested at the State Capitol on Thursday while attempting to attend the governor’s State of the State address.

Hegseth is not only a proponent of Christian Nationalism, as it is commonly understood as the fusion of government with conservative Christian values, but an advocate for a revolutionary theocratic vision for the overthrow of the Constitution of the United States.

It’s hard to find strong enough adjectives to describe the unmitigated disaster the senate hearing on the nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense was. Even the few Republicans who had expressed previous concerns about his nomination handled him with kid gloves.

Antisemitic white nationalist Elijah Schaffer appeared on The Baptist Bias — a Rumble show hosted by Christian extremists Jonathan Shelley and Benjamin “Ben the Baptist” Naim. During the show, Schaffer declared that women who have abortions “should be put to death,” and joked about bombing Planned Parenthood facilities.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. set out in late 2021 to hawk a conspiracy theory-drenched book attacking Anthony Fauci for his work to limit the spread of infectious diseases, he ran into a problem. Mainstream TV networks weren’t interested, due to Kennedy’s penchant for spreading falsehoods about childhood vaccinations, Covid, and other topics.

Tulsi Gabbard’s spiritual “guru” called gay people “perverts” and spewed homophobic slurs when she was involved in his tiny group, an audio recording obtained by the Daily Beast reveals.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) invoked God and religion to harshly question Martin O’Malley, the former Commissioner of the Social Security Administration and a former Governor of Maryland, about his personal views on abortion and his Catholic faith.

The infamous paramilitary group has a new honcho, and designs to influence cops, politicians, and the Boy Scouts.

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warmonger

Trump has named Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth as his choice for secretary of defense, in spite of claims from the Trump campaign and its allies in right-wing media that he would be an “anti-war” president. During his time at Fox News, Hegseth has espoused hawkish views on U.S. military policy, suggesting attacks on Iranian infrastructure and cultural sites and even floating a “preemptive strike” against North Korea.

Right-wing media echoed Trump’s attempts to frame himself as the “anti-war” candidate in 2024

* Right-wing media figures have insinuated that Trump was being prosecuted for his opposition to “the neocon war agenda” and because he “was the first president in 72 years with no new wars.”Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, whose organization was later tapped to help the Trump campaign with voter turnout, added, “Tucker [Carlson] believes they hate Donald Trump largely because of his skepticism toward the war machine, and it’s hard to disagree with that.” Newsweek, [6/13/23; Jacobin, 6/20/23; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 1/12/24; NPR, 10/24/24]

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President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, making it abundantly clear that this will be round two of the revolving door between Fox News and Trump’s administration.

During his tenure as a Fox host, Hegseth endorsed a “preemptive strike” against North Korea, voiced support for American soldiers committing war crimes, smeared veterans applying for government benefits as “dependent,” said January 6 rioters “love freedom,” and repeatedly railed against a supposedly “woke” military.

Hegseth demonstrated his influence over Trump in 2019 by aggressively lobbying — both on-air and privately — for Trump to intercede in the cases of various accused or convicted war criminals, resulting in multiple pardons and the removal of former U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer.

Hegseth has a record on foreign policy and national security of advocating for aggressive military action and championing war crimes

* Hegseth promoted a hoax about homeless veterans being displaced to make room for asylum-seekers. Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [5/13/23; AP News, 5/19/23]

* Hegseth blamed “gun-free zones” for deaths in the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting.Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/5/19]

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mma 1 25

Trump has named Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth as his choice for secretary of defense, in spite of claims from the Trump campaign and its allies in right-wing media that he would be an “anti-war” president. During his time at Fox News, Hegseth has espoused hawkish views on U.S. military policy, suggesting attacks on Iranian infrastructure and cultural sites and even floating a “preemptive strike” against North Korea.

Right-wing media echoed Trump’s attempts to frame himself as the “anti-war” candidate in 2024

* Right-wing media figures have insinuated that Trump was being prosecuted for his opposition to “the neocon war agenda” and because he “was the first president in 72 years with no new wars.”Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, whose organization was later tapped to help the Trump campaign with voter turnout, added, “Tucker [Carlson] believes they hate Donald Trump largely because of his skepticism toward the war machine, and it’s hard to disagree with that.” Newsweek, [6/13/23; Jacobin, 6/20/23; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 1/12/24; NPR, 10/24/24]

//

  1. ### A comprehensive review of the revolving door between Fox and the second Trump administration

11/13/24 11:34 AM EST

  1. ### Trump picked Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Here's some of what he's said on the air.

11/13/24 12:22 PM EST

  1. ### Pete Hegseth's book includes complaints about “Muslims’ birth rates,” praise for “crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes”

11/12/24

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President-elect Donald Trump is taking over the "staggering challenge" of a military that is unprepared to fight America's enemies, conservative analyst Max Boot wrote for The Washington Post — and worse still, he has nominated a man to lead it who doesn't understand why.

This comes as Trump's pick to lead the Department of Defense, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, has come under fire for his history of alleged sexual misconduct, heavy drinking, and advocacy to pardon war criminals — and it also comes as Trump refuses to rule out using military force to seize territories like Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone as part of a neo-imperialist project.

But the military is not even prepared to perform its basic defense duties right now, wrote Boot, let alone engage in wars of aggression and conquest.

"The essential question that senators must ask is whether Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guardsman, has the capacity and experience to prepare the armed forces to fight a major war — and, if so, how he would go about it," wrote Boot. "Because right now, the U.S. military simply is not ready to defeat an adversary such as China or Russia in a protracted conflict."

ALSO READ: Trump intel advisor Devin Nunes still dismisses Russian election meddling as a 'hoax'

Hegseth has repeatedly claimed the military is failing to meet its recruitment goals due to "wokeness" and commitments to diversity alienating the type of masculine soldier stock America once relied on — but that completely misunderstands the issue, wrote Boot: the real problem "is that America became complacent after the Cold War when it downsized its armed forces and its defense-industrial base. Since then, the United States has prepared a military suitable for fighting insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq — but utterly inadequate for an extended fight against a major power."

Today, Boot wrote, we're facing a military that has a degraded ability to construct and service its own ships, a massive shortage of drones, and a lack of infrastructure or institutional knowledge to fix these problems — and despite common complaints about how much money is spent on the military, "While high in absolute terms, U.S. defense spending is just 3 percent of gross domestic product, far below Cold War levels."

"Now it will be up to senators to decide if Hegseth — who was dogged by accusations of mismanagement and misconduct at the two nonprofits he ran — is the right person to rebuild America’s atrophied defense capabilities," Boot concluded. "The committee members should grill him not only about his past, but also about his plans to address this massive challenge. His record doesn’t inspire confidence that he can rise to a task that would severely test far more experienced executives."

12/11/2024 RWW

by

Kyle Mantyla

Newsmax instructed staff to lay off Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host Donald Trump nominated to serve as his secretary of defense, after a segment bashing the pick sparked the ire of Trump himself.

President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he planned to expedite federal regulatory approvals, including all environmental permits, for any company or individual proposing to invest $1 billion or more in a construction project.

A cavalcade of supporting characters in the MAGA universe, and President-elect Donald Trump, showed up at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to attend a soirée for the conspiratorial, QAnon-adjacent conservative nonprofit America’s Future.

A man has been arrested, and Nancy Mace is wearing a wrist brace and shoulder sling after the South Carolina congresswoman said she was “physically accosted” in a Capitol office building on Tuesday afternoon.

Newspaper headlines have called Donald Trump’s victory “decisive,” “massive,” “resounding,” “historic,” and “sweeping.” Trump himself has described his win as a “landslide.” On election night, he claimed that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” None of those things are true.

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deace how to 86 sen

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no lnx

alternet-

Republicans spill the beans: Fox News has a launched lobbying blitz for key Trump nominee

Alexandria Jacobson,Matt Lasloand Raw Story December 12, 2024

As Vice President-elect Sen. J.D. Vance walked the marble halls of the Capitol this week and attended Wednesday's Republican Conference lunch to advocate for Donald Trump's defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, the host's colleagues back at Fox News were also working the phones.

At least two senators have been contacted by people who work with the Fox and Friends Weekend co-host.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Raw Story that Hegseth's Fox colleagues got in touch with him and he considers them "pretty solid references," given that they work with him daily.

"I think most of us have a bias toward supporting the president’s nominees. I think there’s no doubt that Pete's doing a good job meeting people, and I would say also his colleagues at Fox who reached out — they reached out to me — and really giving him just stellar recommendations."

While Johnson said speaking with former colleagues as references is "what you do with any job interview," the secretary of defense is second only to the president as commander-in-chief in charge of the military.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Raw story one Fox colleague had reached out to him directly, and the senator had called three more.

"They love him," he said. "It's very reassuring."

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) told Raw Story "of course" the current relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party is worrisome.

"It's ridiculous," he said.

Tester wasn't aware that Hegseth's colleagues were reaching out to senators.

ALSO READ: Agenda 47: Alarm sounded about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term

"They’re gonna do what they wanna do. I just hope that the person who gets in that position, they’re up for the task and the job, Tester said. "It’s a really important damn job, and that’s the point. It isn’t good guy, bad guy. Doesn’t matter. You gotta be up for the job."

Since Trump nominated Hegseth on Nov. 12, his fitness for the position has been scrutinized. NBC reported that 10 of Hegseth's colleagues at Fox had concerns about his drinking, some allegedly smelling alcohol on him before going on the air. The New Yorker reported that Hegseth was forced out of other previous leadership positions for intoxication on the job, sexist comments and financial mismanagement.

As part of a nondisclosure agreement, Hegseth paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of raping her after drinking at a hotel bar. The Washington Post reported that he claimed the payment was made out of fear of "immediate termination from Fox."

“President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again," Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, told the Washington Post.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Raw Story he had "not yet" been contacted by Hegseth's Fox News peers but agreed there'd been a change in the mood from Republicans this week towards supporting Hegseth.

"I think you'd expect that. Several senators had talked to him, and they were somewhat satisfied," Grassley said.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said he hadn't been contacted by people at Fox News. Both he and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) laughed when Raw Story asked if they were disappointed that Hegseth's colleagues hadn't called.

Hawley said he'd "be happy to talk" with Hegseth's colleagues and found co-hosts vouching for him, particularly regarding concerns about drinking, to be "reasonable and "not unusual."

Trump's decision to nominate cabinet members with strong connections to Fox News appears to be a strategic choice, Hawley said.

"I defer to the president's thinking on this. It seems like to me that he clearly wants people who can defend his policies on TV, in front of the media, so I think clearly he's thinking about if people can talk to reporters," Hawley told Raw Story.

A spokesperson for Fox did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment, nor did a spokesperson for Trump's campaign.

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The most serious allegations against Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick to head the U.S. Department of Defense, involve mismanagement, heavy drinking, infidelity, sexual harassment and even rape.

[vid]

Hegseth denies the allegations butalso claims that because of Jesus he’s a “changed man.” The roots of Hegseth’s version of Christianity are worth a look as he heads into confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate in January 2025.IFrame Content Pete Hegseth’s interview with Megyn Kelly.

In 2023, Hegseth moved from New Jersey to Tennessee to join a church and school community that arises from a 20th-century movement, called Christian Reconstruction. It holds deeply conservative views about the family, roles for women, and how religion and politics are related.

The followers of the movement seek to make America a Christian nation, by which they mean a nation built on biblical law, including its prohibitions and punishments.

Christian Reconstructionists want to dismantle public education and replace modern ideas about family with a patriarchal family model because they claim that biblical law requires both. They believe that Old Testament biblical law applies to today’s society and to everyone, whether or not they are Christian. For them, all of life is religious; there is no separation between religion and politics.

Though only a handful of people are formally tied to Christian Reconstructionism, its influence has been broader.

As a scholar of religion, I have studied Christian conservative movements, especially Christian Reconstructionism, for over 30 years, with six of those years explicitly devoted to the research on Christian Reconstruction. In my book “Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction,” I trace the rise of this obscure theocratic version of Christianity.

When the Trump transition team announced in mid-November 2024 that Hegseth was the choice to serve as Secretary of Defense, his pastor posted on X that Hegseth and his family are members of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a church directly tied to this movement. I know through my research that the workings of the church he has joined make it quite impossible to dissociate and still remain a member in good standing.

History and influence

The movement’s origins go back to the late 1950s and the work of thinker, writer and theologian R.J. Rushdoony. His goal was to “reconstruct” all of society to fit how he understood the Bible. And as I explain in my book, one of his most important strategies for doing that was to eliminate public education and replace it with Christian education.

By establishing the Christian school and Christian home school movements, Christian Reconstructionists brought their version of a biblical worldview to generations of Christians who attended those schools, many of whom had no ties to Christian Reconstructionism itself. The schools taught, and still teach, a curriculum entirely infused with a Christian Reconstruction worldview based on a specific reading of the Bible. History classes become Christian history classes, science classes become the study of creationism, and the study of economics becomes Christian economics.

In the 1970s a Moscow, Idaho, Christian school founder named Doug Wilson, deeply shaped by Christian Reconstruction, expanded his school efforts to include a church, a college, a publishing house and a seminary.

Historian Crawford Gribben also connects Wilson to the earlier Christian Reconstructionist movement. Wilson has said he’s not a Christian Reconstructionist. Nonetheless, he shares their goals and strategies for remaking society according to the Bible.

Wilson also founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals, or CREC, and the Association of Classical Christian Schools, or ACCS. CREC is a group of affiliated churches, somewhat like a small denomination, while ACCS, according to its website, exists to “promote, establish, and equip member schools that are committed to a "classical approach” that emphasizes a “Christian worldview” built on Western philosophy and literature.

Wilson and his institutions send out men to start churches and schools modeled after Moscow. These churches and schools work to shape the larger society, according to their reading of the Bible, starting with the U.S., but the goal is to spread this across the world.

The members of Wilson’s community are known as “Kirkers” – based on the Scottish word for church – and include people who move to Moscow to join. Once there, they buy property and set up businesses. Some of the residents of the town, who are not members of the church, call it “an invasion.”

Wilson is an intentionally provocative and controversial figure who got attention early on for his 1996 book “Southern Slavery: As it Was,” which revives pre-Civil War arguments in favor of slavery. He has also been implicated in accusations of abuse, including abuses of power and sexual abuse. A new 2024 podcast, “Sons of Patriarchy,” explains the culture of Wilson’s world through interviews with scholars, other experts and survivors of abuse.

Church government structures ensure conformity

Hegseth hasn’t talked about Christian Reconstructionism directly, but when he talks about education he repeats their talking points. During an interview on a right-wing podcast, he used militaristic language and agreed with the host that “classical Christian schools” could be “boot camps” to provide “recruits” for an underground army that could eventually launch an “educational insurgency.” He laughingly added later the implications of violence in the larger quote are “metaphorical.” Even taken metaphorically, I believe that the comments show him supporting the goal of using Christian schools to make America a Christian nation.

In Tennessee, Hegseth sent his children to a specific Christian school; he then joined a nearby church, both of which are tied to Wilson’s CREC and ACCS.

The structures and informal workings that make up the CREC and ACCS are designed to ensure theological agreement and submission to church leadership, and protect churches from lawsuits when there are accusations of abuse. These aren’t just churches you can join by showing up.

From my research, I know the CREC churches embrace a style of church government where a candidate for membership must go before the elders – called a session – to show that their conversion was authentic and submit to thorough questioning of their theology. They then usually sign a covenant or make a public verbal covenant, submitting to church elders. These practices are common in old presbyterian and reformed style churches. They are less common today in mainline churches, but still exist in smaller Presbyterian denominations.

If people’s beliefs change after becoming members, they can be brought before church courts on heresy charges.

Members must bring any dispute they might have with members of “recognized churches” to these church courts, as opposed to taking them to “worldly” courts. This largely closes off other avenues for addressing grievances.

The governing bodies that comprise the sessions and the courts are all made up of elders. And only men can be elders, a fact that has become an issue in accusations of abuse.

No distinction between religious and political issues

The U.S. has a long tradition of protecting religion from public criticisms: The U.S. Constitution forbids a “religious test” for officeholders, civic groups often prohibit discussions about religion, and it is generally considered impolite to do so in social contexts.

Senators at Hegseth’s confirmation hearings will likely be reluctant to engage in questions about religion, yet in the religious community with which Hegseth has associated himself, there is no distinction between religious issues and political ones; there is no separation of church and state. Every area of life is to be governed by the Bible, and there is no secular sphere of authority that exists apart from religion.

Julie Ingersoll, Professor of Religious Studies, *University of North Florida

PETE’S DRAGON — PETE HEGSETH’s week started on shaky ground, but it’s ending on firmer terrain.

This morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” President-elect DONALD TRUMPdefended his embattled pick to lead the Pentagon. Asked by moderator Kristen Welker whether he still has confidence in Hegseth, Trump said, “Yes I do. He’s a very smart guy. I’ve known him through Fox, but I’ve known him for a very long time. And he’s basically a military guy.” Trump added that he’s “had a lot of senators call me up saying he’s fantastic.” Asked if he is concerned about Hegseth’s drinking: “I’ve spoken to people who know him very well, and they say he does not have a drinking problem.” ***Video from “Meet the Press”***

That came on the heels of Sen. JONI ERNST(R-Iowa) posting on X Friday that she wants to give Hegseth a “fair hearing.” That may sound unremarkable, but it’s a reminder of something that is: No Republican — not even Ernst — is yet willing to publicly and explicitly oppose his nomination.

Now, a new pressure campaignaims to keep it that way.

MIKE DAVIS —the former top Senate GOP aide who is perhaps Trump’s fiercest legal defender — is something of an outside adviser on the transition. And he’s mobilizing his Article III Project to become the tip of the spear in building pressure from the base on Republican senators to confirm Hegseth.

In recent days, after a blitz of appearances on conservative media, Davis has driven tens of thousands of phone calls, emails and social posts targeting senators on not only Hegseth’s nomination, but also that of would-be FBI director KASH PATEL’s.In numbers shared first with POLITICO, as of last night, Davis marshalled 3,481 advocates for Hegseth (people who have seen his media appearances on conservative outlets and gone to Article III’s action page), driving what he says are 9,377 “connections” with senators. Meanwhile, for Patel, he generated 8,059 advocates and delivered 23,729 connections.

But that’s cornhole compared to what Davis is promising next.

The Iowan is amping up his rhetoric— and the stakes — around Trump’s cabinet picks to the point where he’s questioning whether senators operate with a moral double standard. Earlier this week, he posted to X: “Let’s get this straight: Pete Hegseth used to drink too much and couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. He’d make a great senator.”

In an interview with Playbook, Davis went further, threatening to hire private investigators to sift through the backgrounds of any potential Senate GOP holdouts.

“The Article III projectis very excited about this new standard that drinking and womanizing is disqualifying for public office,” Davis tells Playbook. “I’m very happy to hire investigators for senators and use that standard.”

HOW WE GOT HERE: However you feel about Davis’ tactics, it’s impossible not to see them as the outgrowth of Supreme Court Justice BRETT KAVANAUGH’s 2018 confirmation process.

In that battle, Republicans effectively “made it the rule” that the accuser must (a)come forward publicly and (b)bear the burden of proof, says Davis.

Now, Hegseth’s team is calling that same play.

On Thursday night, Hegseth’s attorney, TIM PARLATORE, practically dared his client’s accuser to share her story (he said she is not barred by an NDA after accusing Hegseth of rape in 2017, though also said if she publicly makes the accusation, he’ll sue her for defamation).

It’s a sign of a post-Kavanaugh standard.“In order to disqualify a qualified cabinet nominee, you have to come forward,” Davis tells Playbook. “The burden is on the accuser to come forward with clear and convincing evidence that they’re not fit for the current job based upon their prior misconduct. It has to be testimony and not innuendo. It has to be testimony, not anonymous sources.”

Adds Davis, ‘You make an allegation, and then Kavanaugh is guilty until he proves his innocence? I said, ‘Fuck that. We’re gonna do the American presumption of innocence.’”

Davis, interestingly, made no effort todefend Hegseth on the merits, particularly on the alleged rape that took place in 2017 — which Hegseth has denied. “We’re not solving crimes,” Davis says. “We’re not canonizing saints during this process. It’s, ‘Do they have the current character and fitness to serve?’”

Few GOP insiders are better equipped to force the argument for Hegseth. After being radicalized by the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, Davis launched the Article III Project, his brass knuckles advocacy group. And he is newly confident — predicting publicly and telling Trump in private — that Hegseth will get confirmed.

He’s not the only one thinking that way on account of the post-Kavanaugh standard and Davis’ new pressure tactics.

STEVE BANNON, speaking on his podcast “The War Room,” said that this technique is already working. “You saw with [withdrawn AG nominee MATT] GAETZ, I said, ‘Stick it out — by Christmas, he’d be drawing fire and they’d be freaking out. You wouldn’t hear Pete’s name. Kash would glide in.’ Fast-tracking works — flood the zone, overwhelm the system. It’s info warfare. … You’ve got to fight back.”

Davis is vowing to do exactly that. Trump, Davis told Playbook, “doesn’t need to fight this, because I’m going to do it for him.”

Is this just Davis’ trademark bluster? Will he actually follow through and hire private investigators to dig into GOP senators’ backgrounds? “Fuck yes I will,” he says.

Good Sunday morning.Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop me a line at awren@politico.com.

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He’s been called the “least qualified nominee in American history,” and has insisted to reporters that his confirmation battle will not be played out in the press, but Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, after multiple appearances before the cameras, appears to be gaining ground on what some assumed last week was a nomination that was dead in the water.

Hegseth has put to use his decade of experience as a Fox News host and leveraged his ties with his former employer to turn the ship around.

In addition to charges of being “wholly unqualified,” Hegseth is attempting to overcome numerous damning allegations, including tattoos that reflect an affinity for Christian nationalism, alleged “aggressive drunkenness,” possible alcohol intoxication on the job, alleged sexual assault of a woman who attended a Republican conference with her husband and children and says she was trapped by Hegseth in his room, and alleged financial mismanagement of two charities that support veterans.

He is also trying to change the accurate perception that he opposes women in combat roles. Women have been in combat roles in the U.S. Armed Forces since 2015. But Hegseth has long been opposed to women in combat.

READ MORE: ‘USA Is a Threat’: Canadians Slam ‘Bully’ Trump’s ‘Arrogant’ Mockery of ‘Governor Trudeau’

Last month, Hegseth took heat after declaring, “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” and that “men in those positions are more capable.”

IFrame Content

“Rather than fight, women are best suited to ‘carry the banner of Christian love’ into war as nurses and support staff members, Hegseth writes,” opinion columnist Carlos Lozada reported at The New York Times last week, citing passages from Hegseth’s book. “Women’s physical shortcomings compared with male warriors — in terms of bone density, muscle mass and lung capacity — would make the U.S. military ‘softer’ and easier to defeat. He also emphasizes that women are naturally ‘life givers,’ so do we really want to train them to become killers? Besides, if men grow accustomed to treating women as equal targets in wartime, he reasons, ‘then you will be hard-pressed to ask them to treat women differently at home.'”

Even top news outlets and political pundits appear to have been hoodwinked after Hegseth’s appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity” Monday night.

Telling Sean Hannity he had a “great” meeting with U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) on Monday, the fast-talking Hegseth launched into apparently pre-scripted remarks (video below):

“I mean, people don’t really know this. I’ve known Senator Ernst for over ten years. I knew her when she was a state senator, running to be the first female combat veteran, and we support her in that effort and have continued to, because, you get, you get into these meetings and and you get, you get to listen to senators as an amazing advise and consent process, and you hear how thoughtful and serious and substantive they are on these key issues that they pertain to our Defense Department, and Joni Ernst is front and center on that, so able to have phone calls and meetings time and time again to talk over the issues is really, really important.”

“And the fact that she’s willing to support me through this process means a lot, and I also want an opportunity here to clarify comments that have been misconstrued that I somehow don’t support women in the military.”

“Some of our greatest warriors, our best warriors out there are women, who who serve raised their right hand to defend this country, and love our nation, want to defend that flag, and they do it every single day around the globe. So I’m not presuming anything, but after President Trump asked me to be his secretary of defense, should I get the opportunity to do that, I look forward to being a secretary for all our warriors, men and women, for the amazing contributions they make in our military.”

READ MORE: ‘I Love His Charisma’: Republican Lauds ‘Man of Integrity’ Hegseth Who Will ‘Get Rid of DEI’

What Hegseth did was change the framing of the controversy.

Hegseth isn’t under fire for saying he doesn’t want women in the military, he is under fire for saying he does not believe women are capable of serving in combat—even after nearly a decade of them doing so.

And yet, that’s exactly what he said on Monday, when he conflated “warriors” with combat soldiers, saying, “I also want an opportunity here to clarify comments that have been misconstrued that I somehow don’t support women in the military.”

And he’s getting help from the media.

Here’s CBS News on Tuesday morning, almost using his words as their own reporting: “now clarifying comments he made that women should not serve in military combat roles.”

His “clarification” did not state he now believes women should serve in combat roles.

IFrame Content

NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday published a report on YouTube titled, Pete Hegseth appears to reverse views on women in combat.”

David Axelrod successfully served as Barack Obama’s chief strategist for both of his presidential campaigns, and as a White House Senior Advisor to the President. Now a CNN senior political analyst, here’s wha:{t he wrote on Tuesday:}:

“Watching Hegseth proclaim his appreciation for women in combat, months after denouncing the idea of women in combat, is reminiscent of the SCOTUS nominees who told skeptical senators that Roe v. Wade was ‘settled law.'”

And while he is correct about the justices, the only woman he proclaimed his appreciation for being in combat was Senator Ernst, who largely holds the key to his confirmation.

Watch Hegseth’s “Hannity” interview and the other videos above, or all at this link.

===

AN 12 24

The Secretary of Defense nomination of Pete Hegseth, the ex-Fox News weekend co-host under a cloud of allegations ranging from sexual assault and sexual harassment to abuse of alcohol to financial mismanagement of two charities, appears to have turned around after several media appearances, and the support from key Republican Senators, especially Joni Ernst, who is being subjected to a “swarm of MAGA attacks,” Politico reports.

Senator Ernst, a combat veteran who sits on the critical Armed Services Committee and initially appeared skeptical about Hegseth running the world’s largest and most lethal military, has opened the door to the possibility of giving him the thumbs up.

Ernst “previously said she wasn’t ready to back Hegseth. But after their second meeting on Monday, she said she’d be ‘supporting him through this process’ — though she would not say whether she would ultimately vote in favor of his confirmation,” ABC News reports.

Meanwhile, Politico reports Ernst’s possibly changed stance may have something to do with the extraordinary pressure she is receiving, thanks to Trump’s transition team and MAGA allies.

READ MORE: Hegseth Successfully Gaslights on Women in ‘Combat’*

“In recent days, allies of Trump adopted an approach that is not novel for the president-elect and his followers: Make life extremely uncomfortable for anyone who dares to oppose him. The swarm of MAGA attacks that Sen. Joni Ernst has experienced is a warning of what’s in store for others who express skepticism of his personnel choices.”

Politico adds that “the palpable shift demonstrated how grassroots pressure, combined with the influence of Vice President-elect JD Vance, helped bolster Hegseth only days after Trump was drawing up contingency plans to tap Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis instead.”

“People in Trump’s orbit believed that if Hegseth’s nomination was ‘sacrificed’ to Ernst, it would become a ‘feeding frenzy’ with the president-elect’s other controversial picks.”

Raju reports there currently are no GOP Senators who have said publicly they absolutely will not vote for Hegseth.

But Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal “says a number of his GOP colleagues are opposed to Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be Defense Secretary,” reports CBS News Congressional Correspondent Scott MacFarlane. “But he says GOP colleagues might still vote for Hegseth because ‘Trump is a bully and a tyrant.'”

Watch below or at this link.

===

AN 12 24

Republican Senators are starting to circle the wagons around President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Defense, former Fox News weekend co-host Pete Hegseth, with one particularly loyal ultra-MAGA lawmaker praising him as a “man of integrity.”

Hegseth has faced criticism for a wide variety of allegations, including tattoos that reflect an affinity for Christian nationalism, alleged “aggressive drunkenness,” possible alcohol intoxication on the job, alleged sexual assault of a woman who attended a Republican conference with her husband and children and says she was trapped by Hegseth in his room, and alleged financial mismanagement of two charities that support veterans.

The alleged sexual assault victim “had texted her husband about her dislike for Hegseth, saying he gave off ‘creeper’ vibes,” USA TODAY reported. “Hotel footage showed them in a verbal altercation at the pool area before she led Hegseth towards his room. She later told police she didn’t know how she ended up in Hegseth’s room, but she remembered he blocked the door and took her phone, she told police. Hegseth told police at the time he was ‘buzzed’ but not drunk, though his lawyer recently claimed he was ‘visibly intoxicated’ and the woman was the ‘the aggressor in the encounter.'”

READ MORE: Jason Miller Tries to Spin Trump

The New Yorker alleged Hegseth that at one of the veterans’ charities, Hegseth “was frequently intoxicated on the job and contributed to a hostile workplace due to sexual misconduct,” USA Today also reported.

“A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events,” The New Yorker also reported. “The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.”

“The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’ In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting ‘Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!’ ”

One Republican U.S. Senator, Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, on Sunday said he did not see Hegseth’s drinking as a problem.

IFrame Content

Monday afternoon, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) declared that Hegseth is a “good man,” and a “man of integrity” who absolutely has his support.

“I think that these anonymous character assassinations by the media are way over-reported,” Marshall insisted.

Fox News host John Roberts interjected, saying, “but some of them weren’t anonymous.”

“Well, the ones that I’ve seen are anonymous,” Marshall claimed, before insisting Hegseth will be a good Secretary of Defense.

“The people elected President Trump for transformational changes,” Marshall claimed. “Pete is gonna get rid of the DEI business going on in the military. He’s going to reward people for their merits that our warfighters out there aren’t afraid who’s standing beside them when the bullets are pouring down.”

READ MORE: ‘You Have to’: Trump Confirms Plan to Deport US Citizens With Undocumented Parents

---

an 12 24

Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth — President-elect Donald Trump's embattled pick to lead the U.S. Defense Department — has been inundated with negative publicity for allegations of everything from sexual assault (which Hegseth has vehemently denied) to public drunkenness and extreme alcohol abuse. Trump has reportedly considered withdrawing the Hegseth nomination and nominating Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the position instead, but Hegseth has vowed to keep making his case for confirmation.

In an article published by The Guardian on December 6, journalist Ben Makuch reports that various watchdog groups are sounding the alarm about Hegseth's "extremist" far-right views —and arguing that someone who holds such opinions is unfit for the defense secretary position.

One of those groups is Taskforce Builder, whose CEO, Kristofer Goldsmith, told The Guardian, "I think it's going to be an absolute disaster. Pete Hegseth is a domestic extremist."

READ MORE:**Why this Dem senator is 'considering voting yes on DeSantis' to replace Hegseth**

Hegseth's tattoos — some of which, critics say, underscore his far-right Christian nationalist views — have been drawing plenty of scrutiny. But according to Goldsmith, Hegseth's books (which include "The War on Warriors" and "American Crusader") are even more damning

Goldsmith told The Guardian, "I know that there's been a lot of attention on his crusader tattoos. There hasn't been enough attention on his actual books…. The guy has tattoos … However, the bigotry and the hatred that he put in black and white, that is more important."

The Guardian also interviewed Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE).

Beirich told the publication, "Just as the insurrection was downplayed by Republicans, so too has extremism in the military…. Also, a new screening database for tattoos was created, some tightening up of clearances, and some more investigative clarity. But a more fulsome effort should have been on the table. Of course, Republicans are far more to blame, as they politicized the whole process, made light of the problem and claimed efforts to root out extremists were giving the military a bad name."

READ MORE:**Senate Republicans 'uncertain they can back' Hegseth: report**

===

an 12 24

With former Fox News host Pete Hegseth — President-elect Donald Trump's embattled nominee for defense secretary — facing allegations of sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse, Trump is reportedly considering offering that position to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis instead.

But Hegseth has vowed to keep fighting for the position. And Hegseth, Mediaite's Diana Falzone reports, has been conducting a "crisis management media tour in a desperate effort to salvage his nomination."

The media tour, Falzone notes, included a "softball interview" with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly and an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

READ MORE:['It's a joke': Trump appointee Ramaswamy's economic plan blasted by expert

"In the Kelly interview," Falzone observes, "Hegseth defended himself against an allegation he raped a woman at a Republican conference in 2017, as well as reports that he has a drinking problem, mismanaged funds at two veterans groups he ran, and his long history of cheating on his wives…. The media campaign is a sign of how desperately Hegseth is fighting to remain Trump's nominee to run the Defense Department, amid reports the incoming president is considering dumping him for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis."

A Trump insider told Mediaite that Trump and his transition team gave Hegseth "special permission" to do the media tour in order to "repair his public image."

The insider said, "Pete needs better storylines…. If enough senators say no, Pete is dead."

Falzone notes, "If any further damaging information comes to light, Hegseth is likely cooked. The Trump insider added that if Hegseth's 2017 rape accuser comes forward, it would be 'hard to come back from' and would give wary senators cover to oppose his nomination."

===

note this comes as he looks like toast? joni or desantis?

cf heg pix in cty dude blk suit fruity

macho defense i have been shot at before; megyn kelly he told me not to bk dn, fight

12 24 an

One-half of the country duo Big & Rich laid into Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Wednesday evening over the senator's comments about Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's embattled pick for Pentagon chief.

John Rich, a vocal supporter of Trump — and vehement opponent of Joe Biden who once mocked the president as "Sniffy" over his sniffles — took to the social media site X to voice his displeasure with Republicans waffling on Hegseth's nomination.

"The pro-war RINO's are all against @PeteHegseth and that tells you all you need to know," wrote Rich. "Pete is a threat to the war machine. Recess appointments?"

He added in a separate post, "Don't Kavanaugh our Hegseth," referring to the tough confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination was dogged by a sexual assault allegation and protests.

Rich then set his sights on Graham, who has called the allegations against Hegseth "disturbing."

"I think some of these articles are very disturbing. He obviously has a chance to defend himself here, but some of this stuff is it's going to be difficult..." Graham told CBS News.

Rich unleashed a series of posts on X targeting Graham, including at least two that used a homophobic reference.

"Who do you trust more? (repost for maximum results and hilarious responses:)" Rich asked his followers, providing just two responses: Santa Claus and Lindsey Graham.

"I sat across from Lindsey Graham at dinner with DJT a while back. As I was answering a direct question from POTUS, Lindsey twirled his Chardonnay (pinkies up) and told Trump I was a raging conspiracy theorist. I gave him a look that would hairlip the devil, then dismantled him," Rich later posted.

He added: "I've seen tougher guys at Starbucks."

Rich didn't stop there. He shared Graham's office number to his followers and urged them to let him know their feelings about confirming Hegseth.

"This better have 5k reposts before I go to bed," he challenged his followers.

Within an hour, the post had thousands of reposts.

"Welp, that didn't take long," he followed up.

---

mma

  1. ### Newsmax's Greg Kelly criticizes Pete Hegseth for allegedly withholding information about his behavior from Trump

12/03/24 10:12 AM EST

  1. ### Newsmax's Greg Kelly says Pete Hegseth “can't” be secretary of defense

12/03/24

===

AN 12 24

Russian state-owned broadcast channels have been bullish on President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet. But hosts on one channel are particularly enthusiastic about two appointees. And they're specifically excited because they believe the Cabinet will quickly bring about the destabilization of the United States.

In a segment posted to YouTube by Russian Media Monitor (a channel created by Daily Beast columnist Julia Davis) Russia-1 anchor Vladimir Solovyov recently heaped praise on Kash Patel, who Trump has nominated to be the next FBI director. Solovyov said that he "really really like[s]" most of Trump's nominees, though he lamented that the Senate "will not let them in." Davis noted that Solovyov and the rest of the panel were "thrilled" about the incoming administration given his Cabinet appointees.

"And the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah," Solovyov said. "What an excellent team is coming along with Trump! Not with respect to Ukraine, but as far as everything else goes, if they are allowed to get in, they will quickly dismantle America, brick by brick."

READ MORE:**'Encouraging decision': Here are the Trump Cabinet picks Russia is most excited about**

"Trump's nominee to head the FBI, Kash Patel, is simply on fire," Solvyov continued, before playing a clip of Patel describing how he would shut down the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C. and turn it into a "museum of the Deep State" while scattering its 7,000 employees across the U.S.

"He's a beaut! He is very, very good!" Solovyov added.

Another panelist — professor Andrey Sidorov, who is the Dean of the School of World Politics at Moscow State University — was complimentary of both Patel and Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth, saying that the latter was in the same vein as Patel. Sidorov said he was "fully in support" of Patel leading the FBI, and exclaimed that "another one like him will head the Defense Department."

Aside from Patel and Hegseth, other Trump Cabinet picks have also received high marks from Russian state media hosts. Director of National Intelligence-designate Tulsi Gabbard has been praised for her friendliness to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Keith Kellogg, who Trump picked to be special envoy for Ukraine, reportedly got a "lukewarm reaction" from Moscow.

READ MORE:'Do we advise the president to look elsewhere?' GOP senators uneasy about Tulsi Gabbard

Watch the video of the panel below, or by clicking this link (comments about Patel and Hegseth start at around the 6:15 mark).

===

Fact Check: Did Pete Hegseth Call Putin a 'War Criminal?'}:

Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com › pete-hegseth-vladimir-put...](https://www.newsweek.com/pete-hegseth-vladimir-putin-war-criminal-1985251)

Claim: Did Pete Hegseth call Putin a 'war criminal'?

Claimed by: Adam Lowisz

Fact check by Newsweek: Needs Context

[### 'Putin's Give-Me-My-S***-Back War': Trump Defense ...

Kyiv Post

https://www.kyivpost.com › Ukraine](https://www.kyivpost.com/post/42139)

Nov 13, 2024 — Pete Hegseth, a Fox News co-host, author, and National Guard veteran, has been nominated to lead the world's most powerful military as Secretary of Defense.

[### Trump's Pentagon Pick Has Criticized US Involvement in ...

Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com › trump-pentagon-pic...](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-pentagon-pick-pete-hegseth-criticized-us-involvement-ukraine-aid-2024-11)

Nov 13, 2024 — President-elect Donald Trump announced Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and Fox News host, as his pick for defense secretary on Tuesday.

---

rww

12/03/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

Fringe denomination's leader argues that men "dream of being rapists" because women aren't submissive enough.

Newsmax host Greg Kelly called on former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to withdraw from consideration after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him to be secretary of defense.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter minced no words in her denunciation of Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense on Monday, calling Pete Hegseth “sleazy” and a “serial adulterer.”

Erin told The Roys Report (TRR) she left because she felt trapped when revival leader and FIRE School of Ministry founder Michael Brown—a man she called “Dad”—would frequently cross physical boundaries. He’d hold her hand, kiss her on the lips, and slap her bottom, she said.

Like Ko-Ko, Lord High Executioner in The Mikado, Kash Patel has a little list and has threatened to come after those people who bear the misfortune of being on it. “We will go out and find the conspirators,” Patel said last year on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “not just in government, but in the media.… Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

On his Rumble and YouTube show, Fight Back, MMA fighter-turned-antisemitic podcaster Jake Shields interviewed ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. During the show, Shields denied being a “white nationalist” while declaring that “we’re doing way too much immigration,” and that “we should stay a majority-white country.”

---

HIS mom CALLS HIM A SLEAZE! but sent 2nd; now on fox saying 7 yrs ago, he is xian/forgiven?

1st to jump ship in order to look smart? influential

an 12 24

as Donald Trump's defense secretary pick, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, faces sexual assault allegations, longtime right-wing commentator Ann Coulter is blasting the MAGA pick on allegations of adultery, Mediaite reports.

"In all of this talk about whether Pete Hegseth is an abuser of women, no one even mentioned that he is a serial adulterer! Are we a society that doesn’t care about adultery anymore?"

Per NJ.com, "Documents surfaced after his nomination that accused Hegseth of sexual assault in 2017. A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public late."

READ MORE:**'Going to come after you': Inside a Cabinet pick's lawsuit against a former Trump official**

But that's not Coulter's main concern.

"Adultery hasn’t even been mentioned," she said on a recent episode of Unsafe with Ann Coulter podcast.

According to Mediate, the conservative host continued:

*And Pete Hegseth is well known to have now been married on his third marriage. Gets married, gets his wife pregnant, little kids at home or kid at home — I don’t know the details. Starts having sex with his producer, dumps his first wife, married his producer, gets her pregnant. Again, she’s either pregnant or she’s home with kid or kids, and then commits adultery on her. Dumps the second wife, and now, I guess is, let’s hope happily married to his third wife. The fact that it was three times, and this sleazy, and everyone at Fox News knew about it is one thing. But seriously, does no one-, no one is even mentioning the adultery! I’m sorry, this is liberals winning. This is liberals changing our culture in this subtle and insidious way where the only rules that matter are the feminist rules, not the rules that have protected women for millennia, like don’t cheat on your wife.

an 12 24

Although some of President-elect Donald Trump's picks for his incoming administration are almost certain to receive bipartisan confirmation in the U.S. Senate — including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) for secretary of state and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for interior secretary — others are extremely controversial. And one pick that is drawing vehement criticism from both the left and the right is Fox News star Pete Hegseth, Trump's choice for defense secretary.

Hegseth's critics have been arguing that although he is a veteran, he lacks the experience necessary to lead the U.S. Defense Department. Moreover, critics warn, Hegseth has faced a sexual assault allegation (although he hasn't been charged with anything) and embraces dangerous Christian nationalist views.

Now, bombshell reporting by journalist Jane Mayer in The New Yorker gives Hegseth's critics more arguments to use against him.

READ MORE:**'National laughingstock:' Election denialism has staying power even after Trump's win**

Mayer, in an article published on December 1, reports that "Hegseth's record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world's largest and most lethal military force."

"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 and Concerned Veterans for America — in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct," Mayer explains. "A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth's tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity — to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization's events."

Mayer continues, "The detailed seven-page report — which was compiled by multiple former CVA employees and sent to the organization's senior management in February 2015 — states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization's female staffers, whom they divided into two groups — the 'party girls' and the 'not-party girls.'"

According to Mayer, a separate letter of complaint alleges that during a visit to Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio on May 29, 2015, a drunken Hegseth was chanting, "Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!"

READ MORE:**Why Kash Patel is Trump's 'scariest hire yet': report**

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, discussed the alcohol abuse allegations against Hegseth.

Blumenthal told Mayer, "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."

*Jane Mayer's full report for The New Yorker is available at this link (subscription required).

---

rww

11/22/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from consideration as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general on Thursday, said Friday he will not be returning to Congress next year.

The news arrives on the same day Trump's former AG pick Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration.

Pete Hegseth is mad. The former weekend Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran who President-elect Donald Trump tapped to lead the Department of Defense has made blasting the states of the American educational system and armed forces a cornerstone of his brand. And one of the things that has him most worked up is measures that the military’s leadership have taken in recent years to weed out far-right extremists from their ranks.

The man President-elect Donald Trump would go on to tap as his “border czar” spent the last several years making appearances on some of the most extreme right-wing media outlets in the country — including a program hosted by an Adolf Hitler-admiring QAnon conspiracist — and promising to implement a brutal regime of mass deportations if Trump returns to the White House.

Streamer Adin Ross appears to be leveling up his partnership with President-elect Donald Trump. The online personality announced that he’ll be hosting a second interview with the president-elect—this time live from the White House after Trump takes office.

In a Nov. 20, 2024 livestream for Right Response Ministries, Christian nationalist Wesley Todd claimed that the United States, if it becomes a “Christian nation,” will enact policies that will drive out non-Christians. This includes banning houses of worship, like mosques and synagogues, and publicly executing “pornographers.”

Donald Trump, his team, his allies, and his supporters in the right-wing media have been calling his presidential win “historic,” and a “landslide,” while using those provably false claims to declare a mandate. The voting from the election earlier this month is still not complete but Trump’s slim margin of victory is likely to shrink even further.

---

rww

11/22/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from consideration as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general on Thursday, said Friday he will not be returning to Congress next year.

The news arrives on the same day Trump's former AG pick Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration.

Pete Hegseth is mad. The former weekend Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran who President-elect Donald Trump tapped to lead the Department of Defense has made blasting the states of the American educational system and armed forces a cornerstone of his brand. And one of the things that has him most worked up is measures that the military’s leadership have taken in recent years to weed out far-right extremists from their ranks.

The man President-elect Donald Trump would go on to tap as his “border czar” spent the last several years making appearances on some of the most extreme right-wing media outlets in the country — including a program hosted by an Adolf Hitler-admiring QAnon conspiracist — and promising to implement a brutal regime of mass deportations if Trump returns to the White House.

Streamer Adin Ross appears to be leveling up his partnership with President-elect Donald Trump. The online personality announced that he’ll be hosting a second interview with the president-elect—this time live from the White House after Trump takes office.

In a Nov. 20, 2024 livestream for Right Response Ministries, Christian nationalist Wesley Todd claimed that the United States, if it becomes a “Christian nation,” will enact policies that will drive out non-Christians. This includes banning houses of worship, like mosques and synagogues, and publicly executing “pornographers.”

Donald Trump, his team, his allies, and his supporters in the right-wing media have been calling his presidential win “historic,” and a “landslide,” while using those provably false claims to declare a mandate. The voting from the election earlier this month is still not complete but Trump’s slim margin of victory is likely to shrink even further.

===

no lnx ymail 11 24

13 things everyone should know about Pete Hegseth

Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims

Nov 18

Fox anchor Pete Hegseth during "FOX & Friends" on August 09, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

Secretary of Defense is one of the most complex and consequential positions on earth. The person in that position is responsible for overseeing the world's largest bureaucracy, the Department of Defense, with over 2.6 million employees and a budget of over $840 billion. The Secretary of Defense is tasked with managing this massive institution to ensure the short-term and long-term security of the United States.

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump nominated Pete Hegseth, the weekend co-host of Fox & Friends, to be the next Secretary of Defense.

Hegseth is a military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star and other commendations. He also served in the National Guard. But the largest organization that Hegseth has previously run is Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch-funded right-wing advocacy organization, where he served as Executive Director from 2012 to 2016. Concerned Veterans for America had a few dozen employees and a budget of around $15 million during his tenure. In that role, Hegseth hired his younger brother, who had just graduated college, to a well-compensated media relations position at the CVA. Hegseth founded a small PAC in his native Minnesota to support conservative candidates. It managed to raise about $15,000 over several years. One-third of the raised funds were "spent on two Christmas parties and reimbursements to Hegseth."

Even Trump's most loyal supporters acknowledge Hegseth's lack of relevant experience. Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist during his first term, said that Hegseth has "never run a big organization" and is "kind of a madman."

But while Hegseth has limited management experience, he has spent many years in the public eye and has a long record of punditry. Here are 13 things everyone should know about the man Trump wants to put in charge of the nation's military.

Popular Information is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism since 2018. It is made possible by readers who upgrade to a paid subscription.

Hegseth says women should not be in combat roles

"I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles," Hegseth said in a media interview on November 10, 2024. According to Hegseth, "[e]verything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat, means casualties are worse."

"Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” Hegseth wrote in his 2024 book The War on Warriors. “We need moms. But not in the military, and especially not in combat units.”

"There aren't enough lesbians in San Francisco to staff the 82nd Airborne like you need, you need the boys in Kentucky and Texas and North Carolina and Wisconsin," Hegseth said in a podcast earlier this year.

Women have formally been allowed to serve in combat roles since 2013 and have been involved in combat operations for decades. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page suggested Hegseth's position is misguided because "women have shown they can perform well in many roles" in the military.

Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of rape to sign an NDA

A woman reportedly alleged that she was raped by Hegseth during an October 2017 conference for the California Federation of Republican Women in Monterey, California. The woman reported the incident to the Monterey police, which investigated the incident but did not file charges. Hegseth, through an attorney, claims that the encounter was consensual.

According to the Washington Post, however, Hegseth paid the woman an undisclosed sum to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Asked whether Hegseth had paid the woman to sign an NDA, Hegseth's attorney said, "there’s no other skeletons to come out."

A friend of the woman wrote a four-page memo to the Trump transition team detailing the incident and suggested that the woman was not fully conscious when she was with Hegseth. According to the memo, the woman "didn’t remember anything until she was in Hegseth’s hotel room and then stumbling to find her hotel room." She then went to the emergency room where "she received a rape-kit examination that 'was positive for semen.'"

Hegseth's lawyer volunteered that Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident and, according to the lawyer, the alleged victim had "been the aggressor."

Hegseth published a column in college that claimed having sex with an unconscious woman is not rape

While he was a student at Princeton in 2002, Hegseth was the publisher of the Princeton Tory, a right-wing student newspaper. In the September 2002 edition of the publication, flagged for Popular Information by Will Davis of Arc Initiatives, Hegseth published a column that claimed having intercourse with an unconscious woman was not rape. The columnist claimed that rape required both the failure to consent and "duress," and women who are passed out cannot experience "duress":

[A] bemusing yet mandatory orientation program, revolved entirely around whether an instance of sexual intercourse constituted “rape.” The actual instance portrayed in the skit was in fact not a clear case of rape – at least not in my home state. (In short, though intercourse was not consented to, there was no duress because the girl drank herself into unconsciousness. Both criteria must be satisfied for rape. Unfortunately, the panelists never cited any legal definition of rape.) Yet the panel – all females in the session I attended – claimed that rape it was.

In an introductory note to students in the September edition, Hegseth wrote that he hoped the Princeton Tory would "help shape the way you view the world."

Hegseth is a serial philanderer, making him a target for blackmail

Hegseth has been married three times. He divorced his first wife in 2009, and according to court records, the marriage dissolved because of Hegseth’s “infidelity.” In August 2017, "while married to his second wife, Hegseth had a daughter with a Fox News producer, a woman with whom he had been having an affair." Hegseth's second wife "filed for divorce in September — a month after the child was born." While many people get married and divorced multiple times, the nature of Hegseth's conduct may make him a target for "blackmail and espionage."

Hegseth criticized injured veterans who receive government assistance

In an April 5, 2019, appearance on Fox News, Hegseth criticized veterans who receive government assistance for injuries sustained during their service. Hegseth bemoaned that "vets groups… encourage vets to apply for every government benefit they can ever get after they leave the service." He argued that, absent a chronic condition, accepting benefits violates "the ethos of service" because it makes veterans "dependent" on the government.

Hegseth praised “waterboarding," blasted the Geneva Conventions

In an April 2016 speech to the Conservative Forum, Hegseth said that “waterboarding,” a form of torture, was an effective “interrogation technique.” Hegseth said that military leaders “taking waterboarding off the table” was “absolutely a mistake.” He also mocked leaders who claimed that it was “inhumane.”

In addition to being illegal, waterboarding and other forms of torture have been shown to elicit unreliable information from detainees.

Further, Hegseth has been critical of the Geneva Conventions, which provide for the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

Hegseth dismissed moral concerns about the use of nuclear weapons

"They won. Who cares," Hegseth wrote in The War on Warriors about the Americans who dropped nuclear bombs on Japan in World War II.

Hegseth pushed Trump to pardon service members convicted of war crimes

Beginning in 2019, Hegseth advocated for Trump to issue pardons to members of the military who had been convicted of war crimes. Hegseth called for Trump to pardon Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who "had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents." Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before receiving a pardon by Trump in 2019.

Hegseth said the United Nations should be shut down

In a May 28, 2020, video, Hegseth said the United Nations should be eliminated:

Stop debating about, like, do we do a little bit less at the U.N.? No. Just get rid of the U.N. Just get rid of it. It is a poisoned body, it is an anti-American, anti-Israel, antisemitic institution that's now bonds together to gang up on us, to gang up on the West. And what use does it have?

Hegseth has a tattoo associated with white nationalists

Hegseth has a tattoo on his bicep that says "Deus Vult," Latin for "God wills it."

The phrase, which has its roots in the First Crusade, has been appropriated as a rallying cry for white supremacists. The tattoo, according to the Associated Press, resulted in Hegseth being "pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration" because he was viewed as a possible "insider threat." Hegseth acknowledged he was excluded, but claimed it was because he had tattoos with Christian imagery.

Hegseth is a member of a Christian supremacist church

Hegseth is a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Doug Wilson, CREC’s founder, openly ascribes to Christian nationalism, wrote a book praising the antebellum South as an idyllic multiracial Christian society, and said that women should not have the right to vote. Wilson and his wife have written books implying that rape within marriage is impossible and several women in Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho church community have accused him of protecting their abusers.

Hegseth has been reported to be in good standing with the church. He is also involved with the Association of Classical Christian Schools, a Christian private school network co-founded by Wilson. His children attend a school in the network and he co-authored a book in 2022 with the network’s president, David Goodwin, about how such schools can save kids from leftist indoctrination in “government schools” and elite universities. Hegseth has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.

Hegseth said rising Muslim birth rates were causing "a slow motion 9/11"

Hegseth is a frequent promoter of Islamophobic rhetoric, and has repeatedly warned about Muslim “birth-rates.” On Fox & Friends Sunday in 2018, Hegseth said that France was experiencing “a slow-motion 9/11” because “Muslims are having 2.6 kids, whereas French-born folks are having 1.6 kids.”

In his book American Crusade, Hegseth makes similar claims, writing that Europe is being “invaded” both “culturally and demographically” by Muslims, lamenting that "in 2019, the most popular name in England for newborn boys was Muhammad.” Hegseth claims that this is also happening in America, but that “we are behind the trends of Europe,” due to our “traditional Christian fabric.”

Hegseth promoted editorial comparing same-sex marriage to bestiality

In September 2002, during Hegseth’s tenure as publisher, the Princeton Tory published an unsigned opinion that compared same-sex marriage to incest and beastiality. The piece denounced the New York Times’ decision to publish same-sex marriage announcements, arguing, “At what point does the paper deem a ‘relationship’ unfit for publication? What if we ‘loved’ our sister and wanted to marry her? Or maybe two women at the same time? A 13-year-old? The family dog?” In October 2002, a piece in the Princeton Tory stated that “boys can wear bras and girls can wear ties until we’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the reality that the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral.”

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth continued to push anti-LGBTQ beliefs, complaining about “ads promoting diversity in the military to ‘trannies and lesbians’” arguing that they were dissuading the “young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks.”

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an 11 24

'Visibly intoxicated': Trump’s defense head pick reportedly paid off sex assault accuser

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mma

  1. ### “Donald Trump is using Fox News as a staffing agency”: Matt Gertz discusses with On The Media the revolving door between Fox and the second Trump administration

11/18/24 11:42 AM EST

  1. ### The Trump administration is planning on deporting millions and millions of immigrants. Fox News is pretending the focus will be much narrower.

11/18/24 11:19 AM EST

  1. ### Angelo Carusone on MSNBC: Pete Hegseth “sees the world through crusader terms”

11/18/24 11:06 AM EST

  1. ### Pete Hegseth repeatedly argued against women in combat roles by citing the military’s sexual assault crisis

11/18/24 9:13 AM EST

  1. ### Angelo Carusone on MSNBC's The Weekend: “The new norm is a bunch of Alex Jones in waiting that we will have to grapple with”

11/16/24 9:43 AM EST

  1. ### Trump’s pick for secretary of defense has a history of spreading conspiracy theories as a Fox News host

11/15/24

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Fox News co-host Pete Hegseth, has a history of spreading baseless conspiracy theories on the network and on social media.

He has promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, including the white nationalist “great replacement” myth; spread misinformation about COVID-19; and used terms like “the deep state” to spread conspiracy theories about “the establishment.”

Trump said his secretary of defense nominee will be Fox host Pete Hegseth, who has complained about women in combat, claimed the military is too “woke,” attacked Muslims, and lobbied Trump to pardon war criminals

* ## Hegseth has spread conspiracy theories about “the establishment” and railed against the “deep state”

11/15/2024rww

by

Kyle Mantyla

What Hegseth does have are connections to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.

Pete Hegseth, the co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend whom Donald Trump intends to nominate for Secretary of Defense, made several appearances on a YouTube show called Reformation Red Pill. The show’s host, Joshua Haymes, is a Christian nationalist who believes surrogacy should be banned, and abortion and gender-affirming care should be punishable by death.

While Democrats have long embraced some of the reforms RFK Jr. endorses when it comes to regulating aspects of the agricultural industry, like factory farming and pesticides, his other outlandish, crank science beliefs have Democrats and Republicans concerned about how he would run the federal public health department.

Huckabee's anti-Palestinian rhetoric has made him a leading figure among Christian Zionists in America.

Just days after Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters canceled his request for bids to purchase 55,000 bibles for public school classrooms—perhaps because his plan to spend $3 million in taxpayer money on bibles Donald Trump endorsed and has a financial stake in appeared to be backfiring—he’s gone ahead and found a different way to suck up to the next president.

A potentially bombshell report into allegations that Matt Gaetz used drugs and had sex with a 17-year-old should never be published, Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday–hours after he partied with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

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an 11 24

concerns are mounting over Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is a vocal opponent of the military’s multiculturalism and decision to allow women to serve in combat, promises to purge the military of generals disloyal to Trump and sports tattoos connected with neo-Nazi and white nationalist movements. “Here’s a man who wrote a book declaring his intention to wage, not metaphorical, but actual war within the United States,” says Jeff Sharlet, an expert on the rise of far-right extremism in the United States. Sharlet explains how Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador to Israel, have Christian nationalist and Christian Zionist views that ultimately work to whip up animosity toward domestic enemies of the far right.

IFrame Content

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman in Denver, Colorado, broadcasting from PBS12 right here in Five Points Media Center, also home to our colleagues at Free Speech TV, a wonderful media center, joined by Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh in New York.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Concerns are mounting over Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, Fox News host and military veteran Pete Hegseth. CBS News reports that Hegseth was one of 12 National Guard members who were removed as guards for President Biden’s 2021 inauguration over possible extremist ties. Hegseth has tattoos associated with the white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, including what’s known as a Jerusalem cross, a symbol used by Christian nationalists.

Meanwhile, officials in Monterey, California, have confirmed police investigated Hegseth as part of an alleged sexual assault that occurred in 2017 at a hotel where Hegseth addressed the California Federation of Republican Women.

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Hegseth has also been a vocal opponent of the Pentagon’s embrace of multiculturalism and the Pentagon’s decision to allow women to serve in combat. Hegseth, who once served at Guantánamo, made headlines in 2019 for pushing Trump to pardon U.S. soldiers accused of war crimes, including one convicted of murder.

We’re joined now by Jeff Sharlet, journalist and author, professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. His book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Professor Sharlet’s new piece for Religion Dispatches is headlined “Meet Pete Hegseth, the Man Who Will Lead the Entire US Military — A Man Deemed an 'Extremist' by the US Military.”

Well, let’s start right there, Jeff Sharlet. Explain what you mean. Who called him an extremist, and what are Pete Hegseth’s views?

JEFF SHARLET: The number one person who called Pete Segseth an extremist is Pete Hegseth. It’s page one of his new book, The War on Warriors. It’s the way he leads out his interviews, this idea that he was too extreme for today’s “woke” military, dominated, as he puts it, his words, by trans, lesbian, Black females. And so, he tells a story of being pushed out of the military. We can’t actually confirm that. No one can confirm that. I think what’s more important about it is that he wants that story out there. He wants it known that he is too far to the right for the Armed Forces.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Jeff Sharlet, could you explain? What do you think led Trump to name him?

JEFF SHARLET: So, Pete Hegseth, one, he’s from Central Casting. He’s got the chiseled jaw. He’s got the biceps that he flexes on his Instagram showing off his tattoos that are from the white supremacist world.

But he really came to Trump’s attention through his advocacy for three military personnel charged or convicted of war crimes, and most famously Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who was — his own men said that he stabbed to death a teenage prisoner who was receiving medical care, shot deliberately a young girl. And Hegseth used his platform to say — to sort of amplify Trump’s idea — we’ve heard that Trump says the “one rough hour” that violence is needed. And Trump liked it.

But more than that, Hegseth promises in his book the first war he’s going to wage is against the U.S. military — that’s whom he describes as the domestic enemy, the enemy within — to purge the generals who are disloyal to Trump and replace them [inaudible] who will do absolutely the commander’s will. And I’m not paraphrasing. What’s startling to me about this pick and the reaction to it is we speak of it as concerns. Here’s a man who wrote a book declaring his intention to wage, not metaphorical, but actual war within the United States. That’s what he says. He says this is not a political project anymore. This is a civil war.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Is anything known at all about his foreign policy positions? What does he think about the position of the U.S. military around the world?

JEFF SHARLET: That’s actually kind of — that’s another part of what makes him appealing to Trump, is, on the one hand, he writes, in traditional fascist style, that war is absolutely necessary for what he calls normal men to realize their masculinity. On the other hand, like Trump, he presents this kind of isolationist posture. It’s not that he doesn’t want Israel to wage total war; he doesn’t care as much about it. So, then he says, “OK, so, where is this war? The war is within, and we will depend on the so-called normal men in Israel.”

He is, however — and this is important — he’s a Christian nationalist. He believes absolutely in the idea of the ingathering of Israel as a stage toward the Book of Revelation in the Bible. So, he sees Israel’s war on the Palestinians as biblical prophecy and one that must be supported for the sake of Christendom.

AMY GOODMAN: And we want to continue on that strain and also talk about Governor Huckabee, also a proud Christian nationalist, who President Trump has nominated to be the ambassador to Israel. But I wanted to stick with something you said for one moment and that you wrote about, Jeff Sharlet, in your piece. You laughed about, you know, his biceps. But it’s what’s on his biceps, those tattoos. “On his chest he’s had inked a 'Jerusalem cross' — a symbol of the crusaders’ holy war against Muslims and Jews — and on the flip side of his bicep there’s this, featured on his Instagram: 'Deus Vult,' God wills it, is more crusader kitsch — and popular with White supremacists.” Talk more about this. And then we’ll play what he has to say to, for example, to Netanyahu.

JEFF SHARLET: So, Hegseth talks a lot about his tattoos. They’re important to him. He began getting them around 2016. The very first one was a cross with a sword running down the middle, which he said was a tribute to one of his favorite biblical verses, Matthew 10:34. This is taken by those who want not a peaceful Christianity, but a war religion. It’s where Christ says, “I come to bring not peace, but the sword.”

He then starts adding this, as I say, crusader kitsch, because it’s important. The Jerusalem cross, it was — is always a political symbol. It’s not a symbol of spiritual struggle, just like “Deus Vult.” But this imagery comes into popular culture not through deep study of history, but through a 2005 Ridley Scott movie, The Kingdom of Heaven. Much like the right at one point was emulating Braveheart, now they’re emulating this movie, this idea of this crusader knight who wages holy war against Muslims, against Jews.

In Hegseth’s book, he talks at great length about the story of Gideon from the Book of Judges. And what’s interesting to him about Gideon is that Gideon’s first step was to purge the enemies within. That was the first battle. And then he emphasizes another part. Gideon goes to war. And we sort of know this. These are sort of Bible stories. But the part that he really likes is that after they won the battle, Gideon orders his men to hunt down every one of the other force and, in Hegseth’s words, “eliminate them all.”

That’s the idea of this sleeve of tattoos, which mixes American nationalism, an AR-15 folded into an American flag, 1775, the year the Army was founded, but also part of sort of the mythos of J6, a group that he has had very positive things to say about.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, we’d like to turn now to ask about President-elect Trump’s selection of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a leading U.S. Christian Zionist who’s openly advocated for Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 2008, Huckabee declared, quote, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” This is Huckabee speaking in 2017, when he was visiting an illegal Israeli settlement.

MIKE HUCKABEE: Israel would only be acting on the property it already owns. I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria. There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighborhoods. They’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Jeff Sharlet, that’s Huckabee speaking in 2017. So, if you could comment on what he said and also why Trump has selected him?

JEFF SHARLET: I mean, Huckabee is a sort of a key element of the Trump coalition. He brings in evangelicals, and particularly kind of the older, more traditional evangelicals. He’s a Southern Baptist. And he’s also been involved with Israel for a long time. As he says, since 1973, he leads pilgrimages of Christians.

It’s important to understand that in all his advocacy for Israel, this comes from no particular care for the Jewish people, but, as he puts it, he says, “It’s because I’ve read the end of the book,” and by which he means the Book of Revelation. And again, like Hegseth, he sees Israel as playing a role in a battle not so much between Israelis and Palestinians, but as between Christendom versus the real enemy.

There’s an episode of his show in which he talks about who’s really behind Hamas. And I tuned in, thinking, you know, he was probably going to talk the various ideas and so on. And instead, he sounded like the old Saturday Night Live character: “Satan.” Hamas is, he argues, demon-filled — again, not a metaphor for him.

So this is the man who is sort of representing the United States in Israel now, who is as fully fundamentalist as even the furthest-right element of the Israeli government right now, and sees this as a holy war — and again, kind of like Hegseth — in which any step is justified. You are fighting for God, and that’s the end of the story for him.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, you have written this book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. You certainly have extensively followed white nationalists, white supremacists. Where do Christian nationalists and Christian Zionists fit into this picture? I mean, he calls himself a Christian Zionist. You heard Huckabee — and by the way, he was the governor of Arkansas. His daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is now the governor of Arkansas, and she was the spokesperson for the first President Trump White House. But where does he fit? Where do Christian Zionists fit into this whole story? And how do Jewish Zionists relate to them? And how does Israel, people like Netanyahu — how do they rely on Christian Zionists?

JEFF SHARLET: Huckabee likes to brag about his special relationship with Netanyahu. And Israel has — or, right-wing Israel governments have said, “Look, Christian Zionists are useful to us, so we’re going to support them.” In fact, the right-wing Israeli governments have said Christian Zionists are actually our better American allies than American Jews.

But Christian Zionism has in some ways been folded into Christian nationalism. Every Christian Zionist is a Christian nationalist, but not every Christian nationalist is a Christian Zionist. Christian nationalism is the larger view — and it tells us something more about what Huckabee is doing. When you go through his archive, so often when he’s talking about Israel, what he’s really talking about is, from his point of view, a struggle for power on the battleground that really matters, which is the United States. And so, for instance, he talks more — when he wants to talk about Hamas, he often talks about Harvard. He talks about elites, these sort of — again, this idea of the enemy within. What happens in Israel is theologically important to him, but it’s more useful politically in the United States. And that’s where it brings us back around to Christian nationalism, this idea of a kind of — not so much a pious nation as a holy war nation, and the war is within.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, we want to thank you so much for being with us, journalist and author, professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. We’ll link to your piece, “Meet Pete Hegseth, the Man Who Will Lead the Entire US Military — A Man Deemed an 'Extremist' by the US Military.”

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mma

Trump's pick for secretary of defense has a long history of warmongering on Fox News

11/14/24 3:08 PM EST

  1. ### Matt Walsh: “My number one qualification for a Trump cabinet post is that the media freaks out over it”

11/14/24 3:00 PM EST

  1. ### CNN’s Bill Weir discusses what to expect from Trump EPA pick Lee Zeldin

11/14/24 2:59 PM EST

  1. ### Heritage President Kevin Roberts: “It would very difficult” for the Trump administration to make policy “without at least consulting” Project 2025

11/14/24 2:07 PM EST

  1. ### Steve Bannon calls defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth “kind of a madman but hey, you need that”

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mma

Trump picked Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Here's some of what he's said on the air.

Written by Isabella Corrao, Helena Hind & Jane Lee

Research contributions from Media Matters Staff

Published 11/13/24

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, making it abundantly clear that this will be round two of the revolving door between Fox News and Trump’s administration.

During his tenure as a Fox host, Hegseth endorsed a “preemptive strike” against North Korea, voiced support for American soldiers committing war crimes, smeared veterans applying for government benefits as “dependent,” said January 6 rioters “love freedom,” and repeatedly railed against a supposedly “woke” military.

Hegseth demonstrated his influence over Trump in 2019 by aggressively lobbying — both on-air and privately — for Trump to intercede in the cases of various accused or convicted war criminals, resulting in multiple pardons and the removal of former U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer.

Hegseth has a record on foreign policy and national security of advocating for aggressive military action and championing war crimes

Miscellaneous

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YIKES TRUMP ADMIN

MMA Trump defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth said in 2020 that the United States should “just get rid of the U.N.”

11/13/24 2:02 PM EST

  1. ### Charlie Kirk threatens to remove Sen. John Thune (R-SD) as majority leader

11/13/24 1:07 PM EST

  1. ### Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts says he's “escastic” over Trump's cabinet picks: “This is exceeding our expectations”

11/13/24 12:57 PM EST

  1. ### Steve Bannon calls for a military tribunal to try retired General Mark Milley for treason

11/13/24 12:50 PM EST

  1. ### Trump picked Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Here's some of what he's said on the air.

11/13/24 12:22 PM EST

  1. ### A comprehensive review of the revolving door between Fox and the second Trump administration

11/13/24 11:34 AM EST

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mma

August 8, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

PETE HEGSETH (GUEST): All I know is — I wrote a book recently, The War on Warriors, about what's happening to our military. The only people I cared about read that book were the guys I served with. I said, "Read it, guys. Let me know. I want to make sure everything's right." And that matters the most to me. He can't look a single guy he served with in the eye.

And that's why all the guys he served with are coming out and calling him out. Remember Swift Vote Veterans for Truth? At least John Kerry went there and then threw his medals in the river. He didn't even go. National Guard Members for Truth, saying he was AWOL, Tim AWOLs when we needed him and he doesn't deserve to be on this ticket. I think this is a real problem because they can't answer these questions.

Contrary to Hegseth's absurd claims about being AWOL, Walz retired after 24 years of service:

Right-wing media are reviving old smears pushed by political rivals of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz about his retirement from the military, accusing him of “stolen valor” and misleading their audience about the reality of his 24-year service record with the National Guard. Specifically, right-wing media are claiming that Walz resigned and “abandoned” his National Guard unit and resigned after the unit received deployment orders to go to Iraq when in reality, Walz resigned two months before the unit received orders, and Walz likely submitted his retirement papers even earlier.

According to a copy of his service record obtained by Military.com, Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1981 and reached the rank of command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, following a reenlistment after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Walz retired honorably as a master sergeant — a lower rank than command sergeant major — since he did not complete all of the necessary coursework for the higher rank before his service ended. Walz went on to successfully campaign for Congress, where he served for multiple terms, helping veterans exposed to toxins during their military service, sponsoring a veterans suicide prevention bill, and advocating for more GI Bill benefits.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/anatomy-smear-campaign-how-right-wing-media-neutralized-pentagon-effort-address-white

no lnx vids

Anatomy of a smear campaign: How right-wing media neutralized a Pentagon effort to address white supremacy in the military

Right-wing media smeared the Pentagon official mitigating white supremacy in the military. Now his unit has been abandoned.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 05/25/23

Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed atmilitary veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

Garrison was tasked with identifying and addressing the type of extremist views that would be later espoused by Jack Teixeira, who recently stole and leaked a trove of classified information to impress his private online community. Teixeira, currently in custody and potentially facing a 25-year sentence, reportedly believed that the United States was heading toward a “race war” that would pit white people against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

The U.S. military has a long history of white supremacism in the ranks, including among veterans who have started or joined far-right terrorist groups after their service. More than 80 people charged with participating in the January 6 insurrection had ties to the military, primarily as former service members, according to CBS News.

The apparently successful right-wing effort to sideline Bishop’s group follows the standard conservative playbook of smearing Democratic government officials who are Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, or from other marginalized groups as internal enemies, and it will also likely serve as a template for future, similar campaigns. Right-wing media outlets have spent months convincing their consumers that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are persecuting conservatives, with the clear aim of operationalizing these federal agencies against these media figures’ opponents — exactly what they wrongly accuse the Biden administration of doing. This programming dovetails exactly with Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which claims to be exposing a governmentwide conspiracy to throttle conservative activists and ideas. The committee has so far failed on its own terms, but Jordan remains undeterred.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

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Then on May 5, conservative website Revolver published a story headlined “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.” The site's founder, Darren Beattie, tweeted the piece out, highlighting the quote “​​The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military." (Beattie was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after CNN discovered that he had attended a white nationalist conference two years prior.)

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment,describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."

Video

CitationFrom the May 6, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Hegseth then referred to Garrison as “the Pentagon's newly minted MAGA purge man” and cribbed Revolver’s line nearly verbatim but without attribution.

“How do I put this?” Hegseth asked. “The White House just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military, past, present, and future."

A day later, Beattie appeared on Hegseth’s program to discuss Revolver’s piece, which largely consisted of Garrison’s tweets and other writings and social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the May 7, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

Days later, conservative media websiteJust the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

Despite the quotation marks in the headline, the piece doesn’t include any evidence that Garrison wrote or spoke that exact phrase. Instead, the piece links to an op-ed Garrison published about the dangers of ideological polarization in news consumption leading to the spread of bad information, a fitting if ironic topic given Revolver’s mischaracterization of his stance. It’s true he described what he characterized as partisan echo chambers as a “digital black plague” that poses a danger to social cohesion, a relatively pedestrian observation common among mainstream commentators.   

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly.

Video

CitationFrom the May 14, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Underscoring the siloed, self-perpetuating conservative media echo chamber, Bannon introduced the topic by claiming, “I’m seeing it everywhere — Just the News has got it, the great Pete Hegseth had it, then he had a second night with you on it,” before asking Beattie for an update.

Beattie then recycled his website’s misleading framing with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, substituting Garrison’s actual point about information silos with the false claim that he opposed free speech protections more broadly.

Beattie described Garrison’s purported role “in the Biden administration’s dark war on the First Amendment. We’ve uncovered a article of his calling, basically, the free speech digital environment that would include War Room, that would include Revolver, but also in his words includes the Sinclair Network and Fox, as a ‘digital black plague’ — those are his words to describe the digital free speech environment that enables the American people to see narratives that oppose the official narratives on COVID, on the election, and now on [the insurrection of] 1/6.”

One day later, Fox News’ Jesse Watters picked up the story, interviewing Hegsethabout Beattie’s reporting, adding another link in the human-centipede-esque food chain of bad information.

Video

CitationFrom the May 15, 2021, edition of Fox News' Watters' World

Watters introduced Garrison as being “in charge of bringing critical race theory into our Armed Forces,” adding, “They’re calling him the Pentagon's hatchet man because his job is to purge patriots from the ranks.”

“This is about, Jesse, as scary as it gets,” Hegseth responded. “I mean, really this is, this truly is a purge of patriots. They're using January 6 as the ultimate justification.”

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Two days later, former Fox News marquee star Tucker Carlsondiscussed Garrison on his prime-time show. 

Video

CitationFrom the May 17, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson referenced Revolver’s posts before characterizing Garrison as “an activist type” and “a lunatic.”

“Now — and this is the point — he is one of the most powerful officials in the U.S. military,” Carlson added. “Democrats in Congress are thrilled as they watch this. Their party now has all the tanks and drones.”

The campaign against Garrison continued at that pace for weeks, misleading framing and bad information congealing into an impenetrable narrative of conservative persecution. Beattie returned to War Room, right-wing Epoch TV covered the story, Carlson aired another segment on it, and Hegseth continued to beat the drum on Fox News.

As late as October 2022, Beattie referenced Garrison on War Room as an antecedent to a supposedly even more “outrageous” Pentagon commission on recommending changes to military bases named after members of the Confederacy. 

Taken as a whole, this process clearly demonstrates how right-wing media will vigorously oppose efforts to mitigate widespread white supremacy and later defend the subsequent, predictable outcomes that ideology and set of power relations produces. As but one example, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira’s actions by misleadingly casting him as a whistleblower when in fact there is no reporting to suggest he ever meant for the information he stole to be made publicly available. The fact that Teixeira’s bigoted beliefs went unnoticed and undisciplined by the military is a feature, not a bug, of this dynamic.   

There are fair criticisms to be made about the larger White House initiative, such as asking what it would mean to root out white supremacy from an institution that has been at the forefront of U.S. empire expansion, directed primarily at nonwhite populations, since at least the Mexican-American War. Needless to say, conservatives were making the exact opposite critique, arguing that attempts to decrease the spread of white supremacist beliefs among service members are inherently illegitimate.

That the boilerplate backlash was successful despite being led by such mediocrities as Pete Hegseth and Darren Beattie — whom Bannon recently derided as a man-child— does not speak particularly well of the Biden administration. It also suggests that these demonization campaigns can potentially succeed absent any shimmering talent leading the charge, instead relying on mid-level functionaries in the larger conservative ecosystem repeatedly hammering the point home.

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Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed at military veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

Garrison was tasked with identifying and addressing the type of extremist views that would be later espoused by Jack Teixeira, who recently stole and leaked a trove of classified information to impress his private online community. Teixeira, currently in custody and potentially facing a 25-year sentence, reportedly believed that the United States was heading toward a “race war” that would pit white people against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

The U.S. military has a long history of white supremacism in the ranks, including among veterans who have started or joined far-right terrorist groups after their service. More than 80 people charged with participating in the January 6 insurrection had ties to the military, primarily as former service members, according to CBS News.

The apparently successful right-wing effort to sideline Bishop’s group follows the standard conservative playbook of smearing Democratic government officials who are Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, or from other marginalized groups as internal enemies, and it will also likely serve as a template for future, similar campaigns. Right-wing media outlets have spent months convincing their consumers that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are persecuting conservatives, with the clear aim of operationalizing these federal agencies against these media figures’ opponents — exactly what they wrongly accuse the Biden administration of doing. This programming dovetails exactly with Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which claims to be exposing a governmentwide conspiracy to throttle conservative activists and ideas. The committee has so far failed on its own terms, but Jordan remains undeterred.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

Then on May 5, conservative website Revolver published a story headlined “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.” The site's founder, Darren Beattie, tweeted the piece out, highlighting the quote “​​The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military." (Beattie was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after CNN discovered that he had attended a white nationalist conference two years prior.)

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment, describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."...

beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

Days later, conservative media website Just the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

Despite the quotation marks in the headline, the piece doesn’t include any evidence that Garrison wrote or spoke that exact phrase. Instead, the piece links to an op-ed Garrison published about the dangers of ideological polarization in news consumption leading to the spread of bad information, a fitting if ironic topic given Revolver’s mischaracterization of his stance. It’s true he described what he characterized as partisan echo chambers as a “digital black plague” that poses a danger to social cohesion, a relatively pedestrian observation common among mainstream commentators.

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/pete-hegseth/fox-host-pete-hegseth-says-separation-church-and-state-not-constitution-thats-whole other thing

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-pete-hegseth-trump-mugshot-will-be-symbol-resistance-against-uniparty-deep-state

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/despite-fox-news-claims-contrary-voters-are-concerned-about-climate-change

no lnx many no vid

Despite Fox News' claims to the contrary, voters are concerned about climate change

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY EVLONDO COOPER

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALLISON FISHER & ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 11/17/22

Despite Fox News’ claims to the contrary, climate change was among top voter concerns during the recent 2022 midterm elections. 

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The issue of climate change took center stage during the general election for the first time in 2020. Since then, poll after poll has found that climate change is top of mind for many voters, and exit polls found that it was a key issue for 2022 midterm voters. Even Fox had to briefly acknowledge this reality, though it won’t likely have any material impact on the network’s climate coverage.

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CNN’s exit poll found that 71% of voters stated that climate change is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, while 61% of voters in Fox News’ voter analysis survey were “very/somewhat concerned” about climate change. Regarding whether climate has become a viable election issue, InsideClimateNews suggested that “the political dynamics around climate in the 2022 midterms could stand out as a milestone.” Or as The New Republic summarized:

This year, more “climate voters,” people whose top issue is the climate crisis, showed up to cast ballots than in any other election in U.S. history. Exit polls show that, contrary to conventional Democratic consultant-class wisdom, climate was the top issue for 8 percent of voters, a share surpassed only by “inflation/economy,” immigration, and abortion (the latter two are tied at second place). You’d never guess it from media coverage, but climate and crime were tied for third place. The percentage of voters prioritizing climate had jumped by four points from 2020, the first year that voters were even asked at the polls about “climate” as opposed to “environment.” There are probably several factors behind this impressive showing.

Climate could play an important role in the Georgia Senate runoff election, especially among socially marginalized communities that have been bearing the brunt of climate-driven extreme weather events and environmental pollution. In addition to grassroots organizing efforts, Climate Monitor noted that “LCV [League of Conservation Voters] has already launched a new video ad supporting Sen. Raphael Warnock in his runoff election on December 6th. Environmental Voter Project is also already spending in Georgia’s Senate runoff.”

This belies Fox News’ attempts to downplay climate change as a concern for voters. This summer, the network, among other right-wing media outlets, cherry-picked data from a Siena College and New York Times pollto claim that Americans did not care about climate change. For example, the July 20 episode of America's Newsroom featured Kellyanne Conway, former White House counselor under President Donald Trump, claiming that President Joe Biden is focusing on climate and the poll shows voters “don't think that he's connected to them in a way that he is listening to them and hearing their concerns.”

Video file

Video CitationFrom the July 20, 2022, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

During the July 24 episode of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth claimed, “They're using the blue checkmark woke brigade to attempt to cudgel the White House to declare a crisis based on 1% of Americans who believe it’s their religion, which could change all of our lives, and change it rapidly, if he caves to groups like this.”

VideoCitationFrom the July 24, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends Weekend

In the months and weeks leading up to the November 8 midterm elections, Fox News continued to downplay voter concerns about climate change. For example, during the September 14 episode of The Story With Martha MacCallum, Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich led off a segment that attacked the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act by using a Gallup poll to claim that “voters are far more concerned with the economy than they are with climate.” Fox News hosted commentator Angela Morabito on the September 27 episode of Fox News at Night, where she claimed that climate change was a “luxury problem” above a chyron that read “Midterm Motivators.”

VideoCitationFrom the September 27, 2022, episode of Fox News at Night

During the September 30 episode of Hannity, Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that if the midterms are a “referendum onJoe Biden, the failed climate cult, and their failed policies, and how they’ve wrecked all the progress that we made in the four years under Donald Trump,then they lose.”

Video Citation  From the September 30, 2022, episode of Fox News' Hannity

After rattling off key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, Fox News host Sandra Smith asked her guests during the October 6 episode of America Reports if “Democrats may live to regret the day they pushed clean energy so hard in this moment when we’re not ready for the transition.”

Video Citation From the October 6, 2022, episode of Fox News' America Reports

However, after the midterm elections, Fox News had to acknowledge that climate was an important issue for voters. During the November 9 episode of America Reports, Smith briefly bowed to reality when confronted with the results of Fox News’ own survey: “When asked how concerned about climate change voters were, 61% said very or somewhat concerned, 39% not too concerned or not at all concerned,” she said. “Climate change was up there, and it was on the mind of voters when they head to the ballot box. So, is this a missed opportunity for Republicans to have some sort of messaging there for voters who care about this issue?”

Video CitationFrom the November 9, 2022, episode of Fox News' America Reports

Despite years of climate science denial and obfuscation, Fox News had to face the fact that voters care about climate change. The network will likely continue running interference for the fossil fuel industry, denying or downplaying how climate is driving extreme weather, and undermining the Biden administration's climate and energy policies, because it is less a news outlet and more a key cog in the fossil fuel industry’sdisinformation network. Even though the veil of reality may slip on Fox News occasionally, it never stays down for long.

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mma 11 22

PETE HEGSETH (FOX NEWS HOST): 268,000 still need to be processes in Arizona.

WILL CAIN (FOX NEWS HOST): So that stat, a stunning stat, buried there in Alexandria's report that in Nevada that was just called in favor of the Democrat candidate Catherine Cortez Masto, 75% of the vote early or mail-in balloting, a stunning stat. Okay, so you mentioned this earlier. Most of the world doesn't conduct elections the way that we have now embraced.

HEGSETH: No, they're not foolish enough to.

CAIN: Yeah, this is a Covid movement that has now been retained. We are still voting not on election day and not in person. We are moving to massive mail-in balloting as really the bulk of our election. Not yet, but we're on the path to that. You know now, when critics, when we suggest hey that might not be the healthiest way to conduct a democracy, critics would say what, you don't want more people voting? You don't want as much of your populace taking place? You know, I would ask this in return. If we right now we decided you know what we're gonna do from now on? We're gonna do internet voting, alright? All you have to do is click on to a website and click. Is that where we're headed? Like because-

RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY (FOX NEWS HOST): Probably.

HEGSETH: That's where they'd want us to.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: They'd love that.

CAIN: I'm here to tell you that more doesn't mean necessarily  healthy. I mean, everybody voting. Do you think everybody is invested in this? Is everyone familiar with the candidates? Do they know the issues? I think that there is a minimal effort in going to the poll that reflects a certain level of investment-

HEGSETH: Investment.

CAIN: - and skin in the game. I think we're gonna have to ask ourselves at some point in the not-too-distant future, what is the threshold of investment? Is it this? A click? Because we're headed there.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Well, also this idea that we would vote months in advance without the same information when we go to the polls. You recall with, just in 2020, how many people voted before they found out about the Hunter Biden laptop. Now granted, the media and big tech suppressed that story, a very important story as we know, as our president is about to meet with XI Jinping and Chinese intelligence knows exactly what's on that laptop even if some Americans at that time didn't, but that said, you know, there were still, the number one Google search was how do I change my vote right after that story came out, even though it was suppressed and people got it. So people should go in with the same information. I believe that it's not about necessarily putting in the effort, I think there is just a beautiful, civic unity moment, we talk about how divided we are, let's have a national holiday on election day. Let's let people, as you said yesterday, let them vote the whole weekend and then up to election day, the weekend before. Let's use paper ballots. Let's have I.D. cards like they do in Mexico and every other country takes their election seriously. And let's have paper ballots so we can track it and feel confident about it, and feel confident in our democracy.

HEGSETH: You're right. I mean when I was deployed to Iraq, our job was to secure elections in Iraq. Where people were trying to blow up polling stations. Al Qaeda was trying to blow up polling stations. You know what Iraq did? You remember the purple finger? The purple finger was I voted once and I can prove I voted already and if I've got ink on my finger, I can't vote again. Simple is better when it comes to elections. The civic engagement of that moment was really significant. Will, what you're not- you're not saying I want less people to vote. That's not the point. What you're saying is voting should not be as simple as ordering an Amazon package because there's a lot more at stake with what you should be considering when you cast your ballot. Everyone get access to that information and whether its a weekend or whatever it is, let's all go together to the polls so that we can all learn together what the result is, and most importantly, have faith in that result. You want to see a threat to democracy? It's what we're watching in Arizona right now. As we don't know whether people are cheating or not, but all I know is there are 265,000 ballots that still haven't been counted and it's Sunday, and is it gonna cut for Kari Lake, will it not? Katie Hobbs is in charge of the elections there. Hopefully it's all aboveboard. Charlie Kirk says so far, it looks like it is, and he pays very close attention. Looks like the next few dumps of ballots will be good for Kari Lake. That will be a test. If Kari Lake can go into Arizona and fix that election system, then I think could about give us hope that Republicans can go on the offense to make this more simple. Simple is better. It means faith in the system.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: But those changes will have to be done very soon, and the reason I say that is right now there's a new generation of people voting who think this is normal.

CAIN: It's the new normal.

They think this is normal. This is the way it's done. So if you wait 10 years to draw this back, they're gonna say oh voter suppression. So I just think, I just think you're right simple is better.

HEGSETH: I'm for purple finger. I'm done. I say purple finger.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: I'm not opposed to that.

CAIN: I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about a lot of things right now. I'm thinking about those man on the streets that Jesse Watters does, or you ask the percentage of American people name the Vice President of the United States, you know? What do you think percentage is of people can name the Vice President of United States.

HEGSETH: It's not very high. I mean, but all of those people --

CAMPOS-DUFFY: But they still have a right to vote.

CAIN: I'm not trying to taking anybody's right to vote away. I want everybody to have the right to vote. All I'm asking is that you understand a little bit what you're voting for.

HEGSETH: Because right now it's here's your ballot. Fill it out right in front of me right now, and and here's the cheat sheet of who you should be voting for. Fill it out. Okay, you're done? I've been watching. Good job. Alright, give me your ballot. Now I hand it in. That's now what civic engagement is supposed to be.

[CROSSTALK]

CAIN: Are you voting for the racist of the good guy?

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Right, yeah no no no. Totally Totally.

HEGSETH: That's how machine politics works.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Or what I told you last week with our young Fox interns who tried to vote for the first time in New York City because they just moved here and they said is this your address right here? I mean, come on.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/kari-lake-2658593938/

no lnx

an 11 22

The Arizona Republican Party’s nominee for governor, Kari Lake, is telling supporters there’s no reason for schools to spend so much time teaching science, math, and history. If elected she would recreate public schools into factories producing young adults who can immediately enter the workforce without the benefit of understanding basic information necessary in a democratic society. In North Carolina, the dominionist Lt. Governor wants to ban the teaching of science and history in elementary schools. And a Fox News host this week claimed that social studies – classes that teach history, culture, geography, political science, philosophy, and psychology – is a fake subject, “made up by progressives.”

That Fox News host is Pete Hegseth, who Donald Trump, when he was president, wanted to nominate to head the Veterans Administration. Hegseth may be best-known, however, for once bragging on Fox News that he hadn’t washed his hands in over a decade.

“Germs are not a real thing,” Hegseth...RELATED: https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/10/this-is-who-they-are-critics-blast-kari-lake-for-mocking-paul-pelosi-after-brutally-violent-assault/...‘This Is Who They Are’: Critics Blast Kari Lake for Mocking Paul Pelosi After Brutally Violent Assault

“Everything about the confines of my classroom was created by progressives 100 years ago,” Hegseth told a live audience this week. “You mentioned the rows. You mentioned that approach – the bell ringing. God being removed of course, lunch breaks, lunch breaks, different subjects, Social Studies.”

That’s when Hegseth got agitated.

“The idea we’re not going to study civics, history, philosophy, theology, we’re going to create psychology and social studies and split it all up as if we can dissect human nature and through a scientific method which they’ve invented.”.

“That’s right, create more perfectible human beings by controlling how they think and what they think, all created by progressives.”

Hegseth thinks taxpayer-funded public schools should teach everything through the “lens” of God, or, more specifically, his God...“Did you take social studies? I took social studies. The progressives made it up it – it’s, it’s a made-up conglomerate of subjects meant to silo the way that we think as opposed to basing all of wisdom in God’s wisdom, in His word, and it all makes sense, looking at it through that lens....[twt] ...social Studies, of course, includes civics and history, and philosophy. In fact, the  offers a definition for social studies:

[READ MORE:

“Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence,” which Hegseth appears to object to.

“Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences.”

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”

Hegseth is not alone in wanting to reduce what children learn.

Republican Kari Lake, Arizona’s GOP nominee for governor and a former TV news reporter whose entire education was in public schools, now thinks school children don’t need to learn as much as they are currently when it comes to science, math, and history.

[READ MORE: ‘We the People – Not Enemies’: President Biden Urges Americans to ‘Preserve Democracy’ in Address to Nation

“I believe we are at a prime opportunity to completely re-envision how our government schools are run, because everyone’s eyes are open,” Lake told supporters at an event while campaigning with far-right white Christian nationalist U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).

“And who says we have to have this many hours of science, this many of math and history? We can change that up,” said Lake about an entire state’s public school system that already has been “ranked worst across the 50 United States of America,” according to a report in Arizona’s KGUN 9 News.

“What does it mean to have a high school diploma? It should mean that you know some of the basics, and you also have some ability to go out and make a living. Our schools have our kids for 13 years from K through 12 and at the end of 13 years, we should have some competent adults going into the world who can make a living because there are jobs out there.”

[twt vid patriot takes]

notice how Lake doesn’t say, “public schools,” but “government schools,” a term many on the right use to demonize public schools, expanding their belief that anything the government does is wrong, bad, or a waste of tax dollars.

Lake also sounds like she’s suggesting high school graduates are not able to get jobs because they have spent too much time learning about science, math, and history.

Then there’s far right Christian dominionist Republican Lt. Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson, who is another extremist attacking education.

Robinson made national headlines after calling LGBTQ people “filth.”

In August MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones wrote that Robinson “may well be the most bigoted official in the United States with the least name recognition.”

Calling him “a full-on extremist,” Jones writes that Robinson And “reportedly has a new, ludicrous belief to share with the masses: Science and history shouldn’t be taught to students until they reach sixth grade.”

“First through fifth grades ‘don’t need to be teaching social studies,’ he wrote, according to local NBC affiliate WRAL-TV, which obtained an advanced copy of his upcoming book,” Jones adds, reporting that Robinson wrote: “We don’t need to be teaching science. We surely don’t need to be talking about equity and social justice.”

There’s more to Robinson’s extremist ideas on education.

Get rid of it. Or, specifically, Jones writes, Robinson has ” called for the elimination of the state’s board of education.”

“Robinson said flatly what most fact-averse conservatives won’t admit about their education crusade,” Jones continues. “They fear accurate history lessons that could inevitably lead to discussions about systemic disparities. And they fear discussions about science, which may undermine the fundamentalist Christian beliefs at the heart of the conservative movement.”

Jones sums up this entire approach to public education from the right.

“Robinson’s reported ideas about education showcase the logical endpoint of the Republican Party’s assault on lessons about social inequality: an eagerness to keep children stupid.”

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an 7 22 raw

fuck your feelings: [cspan book TV had several on slavery eg UVA?] free exge of idea (free mkt in the gift shop? buy it or not, or buy and burn it.

Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy lashed out on Sunday because she said she was made to feel "ashamed" and "guilty" after visiting the home of former President Thomas Jefferson and learning about how he owned slaves.

During a discussion on Fox & Friends,host Pete Hegseth complained about how the "whole tone" at Jefferson's Monticello home has changed to focus on his slave ownership.

"It's overwhelmingly negative!" Hegseth exclaimed. "You go to visit the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and you learn about what a terrible person Thomas Jefferson was."

Hegseth said that one visitor noted that "half of the comments on Jefferson were critical."

Campos-Duffy recounted her visit to Monticello.

"I visited many of these homes," she recalled. "And that is definitely what I picked up from all of this, that there is a reorienting, reconstructing of the history to basically make sure that the idea that they had slaves is on the same level as what they did for our country."

"There are slaves across human history," the Fox News host continued. "I get that. It's a terrible history we should talk about but we should not feel guilty or ashamed of our leaders when we go and visit the people who brought us the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. You leave feeling that way."

Campos-Duffy complained that "anti-racism" books could be found in the gift shop at Jefferson's home.

"These were great men as far as their ideas go but they were able to build this on the backs of slaves and we honor that," co-host Joey Jones chimed in. "And we talk about that. That's different than re-writing the importance of Jefferson, the importance of Washington or whoever it may be. And why have Monticello at all if you're only going to use it for grievance?"

Jones argued that liberal leaders are not "perfect" either.

"Socialists," Campos-Duffy quipped. "You come away thinking how terrible this country is."

"Where's all this coming from?" she asked. "The homes of these presidents are being populated -- this is avery diabolical plan on the part of the left. So what they've done is they've taken their donors on the left and they've populated the boards of these estates with leftists."

"Don't look over here at all the amazing things that Thomas Jefferson unleashed," Hegseth agreed. "It's always about inclusivity. It's the buzzword they use. And we fall into the trap! Because good, earnest historians who take care of Monticello sit there and they go, 'Oh, you're right. You know what? We haven't included enough about the fact that he was a slave owner. So let's include more of that.' And then the ideologues come in with their money and say, let's make it all about that!"

"And then you get kids coming through thinking Thomas Jefferson was a bad guy," he remarked. "We get accused of wanting to 'whitewash' or not talk about that. We will talk about that. We know that. That's a real deal. But making it about America being an evil place is when we get into the realm of a cultural revolution."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

---

---

mma 6 22

sTEVE DOOCY(CO-HOST): Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, a brand new book that hits the shelves today. In it, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin discuss how American education has been destroyed and what we can do to restore it. Here's an excerpt. "Make no mistake about it the historical singularity that was America's founding was a result of classical Christian education. Full stop. Our founders did not stumble their way to brilliance of 1776. They were forged in the foundry of the education of their time." And Pete and David join us live right now. And they've got the number one book in the world. Who's who?

PETE HEGSETH (AUTHOR, FOX AND FRIENDS WEEKEND CO-HOST): Pete. David.

DOOCY: Thank you very much. David, it's very nice to meet you. We were talking to Pete about this yesterday. This is part of a master plan that a lot of people don't have any idea has been going on for decades.

DAVID GOODWIN (AUTHOR): Right.

DOOCY: Regarding education in the country.

GOODWIN: Yes. Well, you know, that's when I was doing the research, some of the research through the original book, which The New Republic in the early part of the 20th century. I thought I would find a lot about labor unions and a lot about minimum wage, a lot about, you know, the things that we know that the progressives were talking about at the time. But education was in every issue. And I was wondering, why.

DOOCY: Right. And Pete who would –who drew up this master plan?

HEGSETH: Well, there were a lot of – there wasn't one master architect, John Dewey's the father of the progressive educational system.

DOOCY: But they were like-minded.

HEGSETH: Very like-minded. Almost all atheists. Almost all socialists. Eventually, almost all Marxists.And they had a plan to capture the minds of our youngest kids. And we're not talking about the lunacy of higher education. This is K through 12. They knew the affections of young people. Elementary school students would shape the way they view America, their faith, for the rest of their life. And so they set it out on a course. They didn't know exactly where it would lead, Steve. All of these architects of progressives, but they knew where it wouldn't lead: Not toward Biblical wisdom, not toward appreciation for our founding documents.And people say to David I all the time, How do I not know this history?

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: 100-year history. You know why? Because the progressives write the history. They write the textbooks.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: So, David and I had to dig underneath everything that's hidden to find out the real story of how they captured K through 12.

DOOCY: You know, and David, we've known for a long time that America's colleges, for the most part. are way to the left, very progressive. But I don't think a lot of people realized until the last decade or so when they started looking in America'stextbooks,how far to the left aome are trying to drag K through 12.

GOODWIN: Well, they've had the advantage. When you have the college system, you control the instruments of education all the way down to the kindergarten. Right. Because you train the teachers, you train the administrators, you train the curriculum providers. You're the ones doing the accreditation, the college – at the college level. All of that flows right from the, you know, kind of nodes of control that the progressives had.

DOOCY: And, you know Pete, so many parents got a good look at what their kids were doing during COVID-19. Your first chapter is our COVID 1619 moment.

HEGSETH: It's exactly right. You're at home looking at your kid's curriculum through your laptop, and suddenly there's a new founding date on their screen, 1619 or they're talking about gender pronouns for seven or eight-year-olds.[note no eg]  So we start with the problem, and the first step to any recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And we outline that. But the best part of the book, in our opinion is those five chapters at the end that are about the solution. AndDavid runs the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: Classical Christian Dot Org. There are hundreds of wonderful brick-and-mortar schools across the country that are the exact opposite of what our government schools provide right now. There are online options, there arehomeschoolcurriculum options. The insurgency to take our classroom back has begun, and that's the preferred form of ideological warfare of the weak against the small. You do not have to default to progressive public schools, because otherwise, you're going to war with an educational complex that has 40 hours a week to capture your kid's mind. And that's why we call it a battle. It really is for parents and grandparents.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-host-got-way-more-than-he-bargained-for-when-he-defended-trumps-support-of-putin/

ukraine invade

last twt is pix of 2007 ltr trump congtat putin on man of yr you deserve it

Watch: Fox News host got way more than he bargained for when he defended Trump’s support of Putin

Meaghan Ellis February 23, 2022

When Fox News host Pete Hegseth attempted to rationalize former President Donald Trump's support of Russian President Vladamir Putin, Twitter users quickly fired back to correct him for his warped defense.

On Tuesday, February 22, Hegseth weighed in on the circumstances surrounding Trump and Putin as he claimed the former president's actions are an attempt to troll the media.

“No organism, no entity, has done more to spread Russian propaganda and to prop up the strawman that is Vladimir Putin than our very own media,” Hegseth said.

According to Hegseth, Trump's support of Putin is nothing more than a ploy. “Donald Trump was happy to troll them on it as he continues to do to this moment,” Hegseth said. “Because they can’t resist it, and they’ll obsess over it.”

Despite Hegseth's attempt to smooth things over, HuffPost notes that: "Hegseth claimed the media was working to spread Russian propaganda on the same network where fellow Fox News host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly defended Putin, aired Kremlin talking points and touted pro-Russia conspiracy theories."

Reacting to Hegseth's bizarre argument, Twitter users quickly resorted to mocking the clueless conservative host.

"Noted idiot Pete Hegseth (who thinks germs aren't real bc he can't see them) says Putin lives 'rent-free' in the minds of the media," anti-racism educator Tim Wise tweeted. "Imagine if any 'reporter' or commentator had said Breshnev or Kruschev lived rent-free in the minds of the right..."

Another user wrote, "Wow. That's desperate. But how else are they going to explain the insane reaction of #TraitorTrump in a way that doesn't make him look as bad as he really is? Trump has always been on Team Putin. If you can't see this obvious fact, it's because you can't handle the truth."

---

mma 1 22

HEGSETH (HOST): Ultimately, it devolves into, "Well, it's not our failure. We're opposed by a bunch of white nationalists and a bunch of racists. 52 of them who came together and didn't let us change the filibuster that we used 300 times the last year of -- or in the years of the Trump presidency." If you're then again defaulting to racism, you really haven't learned any lessons here.

CHARLIE KIRK (GUEST):  No, not at all. And it's just disappointing. It's bad for the country. It's a reversion back to tribalism. And that's all they have.And they've made a decision to no longer try to have class warfare. They want racial warfare. And I say everywhere I go across the country, "Don't fall for it. This is so sloppy. It's wrong, it's immoral."

---

an 721

Texas Democratic lawmaker who fled the LoneStar state for Washington, D.C., to halt the passing of a controversial voting rights bill recently torched a Fox News reporter who refused to acknowledge former President Donald Trump's election loss.

On Tuesday, July 13, Fox News host Pete Hegseth found himself embroiled in a heated debate with Texas state lawmaker James Talarico, one of 50 Democratic lawmakers who left the state. Lawmakers made the decision to flee in an effort to deny Republican lawmakers the quorum needed to pass the controversial measures.

During the interview, Hegseth claimed Talarico was being used "as a prop or puppet" by top-ranking Democratic lawmakers in D.C. However, Talarico immediately pushed back.

"I'm an eighth-generation Texan," Talarico said. "I've only been in DC twice in my life … I'm a former middle-school teacher who ran for office just to try to make my community better and I swore an oath when I first got elected two years ago to uphold the constitution.

"The constitution of the United States, and also the constitution of the great state of Texas. And after our former President Donald Trump started his big lie that the election was stolen. Republican legislators in capitals across the country started —"

The host quickly interrupted asking, "How did you make this about Donald Trump in 20 seconds?"

He continued, "Why are you not in Texas, and why are you in Washington DC doing press conferences with federal officials?"

Not deterred, Talarico continued with his remarks.

"What I was saying," Talarico said, "is when President Trump lost the election he told Republicans across the country that he didn't lose the election, and this caused Republican legislators in state capitals from Georgia to Austin to start putting forward bills that would make it harder to vote. Texas is one of the hardest places to vote in the whole country. And so when me my Democratic colleagues tried to negotiate with our fellow legislators, most of them Republicans, to try to make the bill less damaging, less harmful, less dangerous to constituencies across the state of Texas, unfortunately, our Republican colleagues didn't want …"

Hegseth attempted to interrupt again as he raised concerns about the claims of widespread voter fraud and the need for poll watchers. However, that didn't stop Talarico either.

"Do you remember a second ago when I talked about the big lie?" Talarico asked. "This is exactly what I'm talking about. The reason so many folks believe it is true is because folks like you get on television every night and repeat the lie over and over again."

Talarico added that Hegseth had "made a lot of money personally and you've enriched a lot of corporations with advertising by getting on here and spewing lies and conspiracy theories to folks who … what I'm asking you to do is tell your voters right now that Donald Trump lost the election in 2020."

Talarico decided to ask a more direct question; one Hegseth could not answer. The lawmaker asked, "Did Donald Trump lose the election in 2020? Can you answer the question? Did Donald Trump lose the election in 2020?

Hegseth said, "I think I'm answering the questions," to which Talarico asked, "Is it an uncomfortable question for you?"

Hegseth could only respond by saying, "No." Of course, the Fox News host never offered a direct answer the question.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/michigan-2649008572/

michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield (R) on Sunday explained how a constitutional crisis could mean a win for President Donald Trump despite losing the popular vote in his state.

In an interview with Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Chatfield defended his recent meeting with Trump. Prior to the meeting, critics warned that it gave the current president an opportunity to push Michigan lawmakers not to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory.

"When the president of the United States calls, you take that meeting," Chatfield insisted. "There was this outrage that the president was going to ask us to break the law and he was going to ask us to interfere. And that simply didn't happen."

The Michigan lawmaker went on to outline Trump's path to victory in his state, which began with a Republican Party request to delay certification of the election for two weeks.

"We have 71 percent of the precincts in Wayne County, their absentee ballots books don't match what is on the rolls," he said. "That's why the legislature, we've been doing our own investigations."

"If there were to be a 2-2 split on the state Board of Canvassers, it would then go to the Michigan Supreme Court," Chatfield continued. "If they didn't have an order that it be certified, well now we have a constitutional crisis in the state of Michigan. It's never occurred before because as the federal constitution says, this is left up to the state legislatures. The state legislature decided long ago to do it this way."

"What if the state legislature is mixed on whether or not they have confidence in who won the greater number of votes?" Hegseth replied. "Then you're in a interesting place."

"It's a place I really don't want to be in," Chatfield remarked. "There's reports of irregularities, reports of fraud. The fact is, no Republican or Democrat should be upset about an investigation done by the legislature. And we've begun those investigations."

Democratic state Rep. Matt Koleszar responded to Chatfield on Twitter.

"Mr. Speaker continues to use vague language in his interviews and statements about safeguarding the election," Koleszar said. "The constitutional crisis has already begun sir. It began the day you and other leaders refused to stand behind our clerks and election process."

"This is the crisis," he added.

Watch the video below from Fox News.

---

==

1120 mma

Fox host Pete Hegseth said that Republicans will keep losing presidential elections unless they make it harder for people to vote.

==

MMA TAG

https://www.mediamatters.org/pete-hegseth

Pete Hegseth is a Fox & Friends Weekend co-host who frequently advises President Trump both on-air and privately and campaigned to be named as Trump’s Veterans Affairs secretary. He also has lobbied the president to pardon military personnel charged and convicted of war crimes. Hegseth founded the Koch-linked conservative nonprofit Concerned Veterans for America in 2011, which he ran till around the 2016 presidential primaries.

Featured

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screen grab

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Hegseth Afghanistan bounty story 6/28/20

Fox host on reports of lack of White House response to Russian bounties for killing U.S. troops: “You can make a decision to do nothing too”

06/28/20 9:22 AM EDT

Pete Hegseth and the hosts of Fox & Friends' weekday editions

Pete Hegseth promotes a “reopen movement” website: “The authorities can't shut everybody down if we the people say we're open”

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Fox News host applauds Senate investigation of Hunter Biden: “Donald Trump has taught Republicans” to “fight”

05/20/20 3:43 PM EDT

pete-hegseth-new-jersey-gym-interview-crowd-chanting-war-05-18-2020.jpg

Fox News give celebratory coverage to New Jersey gym’s reopening against coronavirus lockdowns

05/18/20 9:26 PM EDT

brian-kilmeade-fox-friends-military-mindset-coronavirus-78000-dead-05-11-2020.jpg

Fox News hosts call for “military mindset” to get people to enter public spaces despite COVID-19 threat

05/11/20 9:28 AM EDT

==

where is he on suckers losers and

920 an

Stewart joins veterans in DC to demand attention for a deadly policy killing US troops

Aysha Qamar / Daily Kos

---

tex talk radio rush]

https://www.wbap.com/2020/09/07/trump-calls-for-fox-news-reporter-to-be-fired-for-confirming-parts-of-the-atlantic-article/

no lnx

trump Calls for Fox News Reporter to be Fired for Confirming Parts of ‘The Atlantic’ Article

Posted on September 7, 2020

WASHINGTON – Fox Radio News (WBAP/KLIF) – President Trump has called an article in The Atlantic that claimed that Mr. Trump resisted a visit to an American military cemetery in France in 2018, and called the U.S. casualties from World War I “losers” and “suckers”, a hoax and fake news.

The allegations come from unidentified defense officials who claim the president said in 2018 that a World War One American war cemetery in France was “filled with losers,” and such service members were “suckers” for being killed.

At least one Department of Defense official has since publicly confirmed the report in its entirety.

Meantime, Fox’s Jennifer Griffin reports that according to her sources, the story may be more credible than the President says.

Trump has called for Griffin to be fired.

Mercedes Schlapp (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Meantime, on Fox’s “America’s News HQ” Saturday afternoon, Trump 2020 Senior Adviser Mercedes Schlapp (pictured right) fired back, saying that President Trump has always respected the military and been committed to supporting it. Schlapp called The Atlantic story, “fake.”

“First of all I think you see that the story is fake. You’re talking about here, you’re going to add the number of 11 people on the record; former administration officials that have worked closely with the president who know that this is not an accurate story.”

Former Secretary of Defense and former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) reacted to the article and the claims made in it during an appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week”.

“If they’re real they’re beneath the dignity of the Commander in Chief, truly they’re despicable. Hagle added, “Let’s go back and look at the words himself, coming out of his own mouth starting in 2016 with what he said about John McCain and what he continued to say about McCain [… uh] how he degraded the service of generals Mattis and McMaster and just recently General Kelly. This history of this president over the last 3 or 4 years is pretty clear.

The Twitter group @VoteVets features a video with several Gold Star families who say they loved ones were not “suckers” or “losers.”

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-host-reports-lack-white-house-response-russian-bounties-killing-us-troops-you-can

june 28 ed

PETE HEGSETH (CO-HOST): Listen, it's no surprise to anybody, the Russians meddling first of all, and second of all, in Afghanistan where they had an occupation for years, ultimately expelled. If they want to try to take over Afghanistan, [RUSSIANS?!] part of the president's rationale of foreign policy is we shouldn't be spending trillions of American dollars and American lives there.Doesn't dismiss the fact that Russia is our enemy, which we know, but to point this at The White House and say they're complicit with Putin I think is to miss the whole story.

GRIFF JENKINS (FOX CORRESPONDENT AND CO-HOST): Yeah. A lot more --

JEDEDIAH BILA (CO-HOST):I mean, the key obviously if he was briefed on it or not, right? I mean, so if he was briefed on it and did nothing, then people will have something to say about that. If he didn't wasn't briefed on it and that's fake news, then people will have something to say about that as well, so it remains to be seen.

HEGSETH: Yeah, you can make a decision to do nothing too. I mean, Russia's paying bounties for Islamists for years. I mean, this is not a new thing ultimately, even if it is unfortunate. [ he means TO them? NO EVIDENCE

---

bs site dan b

https://www.joshwho.net/you-refuted-your-own-point-dan-bongino-fires-back-at-donna-brazile-over-russian-bounty-reports/

june 30

dan Bongino fired back at Donna Brazile over reports that Russia had offered bounties to Afghan terrorists for killing coalition troops — including Americans.

Bongino and Brazile squared off Tuesday during a heated segment on Fox News’ “The Five,” discussing those reports and the White House’s response — namely that President Donald Trump had not been briefed on that intelligence because it had not been verified. (RELATED: ‘Don’t You Dare Be A Fraud Right Now!’: Dan Bongino And Geraldo Rivera Trade Barbs Over Rayshard Brooks)

WATCH:

Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who subbed for regular host Jesse Watters after some technical difficulties, addressed the issue first. Arguing that the reported bounties were not sufficient to send American troops back in to further entanglements in Afghanistan, Hegseth added, “I also think we should believe the White House when they say the president wasn’t briefed on this and maybe the intelligence wasn’t where it should be.”

Fox Business host Lisa Kennedy then turned the question to Brazile, noting that former President Barack Obama had set the stage for the current relationship with Russia. “Do you think that President Obama did it right in terms of Russia and will Joe Biden continue that?” she asked.

Brazile challenged Kennedy, saying, “Here’s what I want to say. I understand that every time you have a conversation that Donald Trump is to blame for something you have to bring it back to Barack Obama, George Bush, or Abraham Lincoln. I don’t really care.”

“President Trump has now known for four days that the Russians may have spent money to try to kill our troops, four days,” Brazile continued, turning back to President Donald Trump. “What are you going to do about it, Mr. President? Are you going to let Mr. Putin kill our troops?”

Brazile concluded by saying that American soldiers’ lives were too important to be political footballs, adding, “I can tell you as the daughter of a veteran, if I knew somebody put a bounty on somebody serving in my military I would not be sitting here trying to play some game. Get off your behind and address it, I have to say that.”

“Donna, that was nice but you refuted your own point,” Bongino replied, noting that she had said what she would do if she knew of such a bounty placed on American troops — and that the intelligence community had been at odds over whether the report was accurate.

“This is why you don’t make decisions based on information that’s not confirmed,” Bongino concluded. “You refuted your own point.”

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hegseth

broze star, iraq/afgn

peter Brian Hegseth (born June 6, 1980) is an American Fox News host and author.[1]

He is a former Army National Guard officer and former executive director of the political advocacy groups Vets For Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America. The latter is a conservative advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers, which advocates for greater privatization of the Department of Veterans Affairs(VA).[2] He was in consideration to head the United States Department of Veteran Affairs in the Trump administration, but major veterans' groups objected, and in January 2017, David Shulkin was selected instead.[3][4]

Education[edit]

Hegseth attended Forest Lake Area High School in Forest Lake, Minnesota, and received his Bachelor of Arts at Princeton University in 2003.[5] In 2013, he received a Master in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.[6]

At Princeton, Hegseth was the publisher of The Princeton Tory, a conservative student-run publication.[7]

Military career[

Following graduation from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth joined Bear Stearns as an equity capital markets analyst and was also commissioned as a reserve infantry officer into the U.S. Army National Guard.[8] In 2004 his unit was called to Guantánamo Bay, where he served as an infantry platoon leader. He was awarded the Army Commendation Medal. Shortly after returning from Cuba, Hegseth volunteered to serve inBaghdad and Samarra,where he held the position of infantry platoon leader and, later in Samarra, as civil–military operations officer. During his time in Iraq, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, Combat Infantryman Badge, and a second Army Commendation Medal.[9]

Conservative activism and Senate campaign[

Upon return from Iraq, Hegseth worked briefly at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. According to his LinkedIn page, Hegseth left the conservative think tank in 2007 to work at Vets For Freedom as executive director.[10] His role included responding to the Federal Election Commission as "treasurer" of the organization.[11][12] He worked at Vets for Freedom until 2012.[10] The organization advocated for a greater troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.[10] Hegseth formed the p**olitical action committeeMN PAC in 2012.[10]

Hegseth was the executive director for Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers.[2] The group advocated for greater privatization of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).[2] According to his LinkedIn page, he left the group in 2015.[2]

2012 Senate campaign[

Hegseth ran for the Republican nomination for the 2012 United States **Senate** election in Minnesota.[10] He withdrew from the race after the May 2012 convention, before the Republican primary election in August,[13][14] both events in which Kurt Bills won nomination.

Questioned spending[

While Hegseth was its chief executive, Concerned Veterans for America hired his brother Philip to work for the non-profit and paid him $108,000 according to tax records from 2016 and 2017. Asked about it, Hegseth's lawyer said that Philip, a May 2015 university graduate, was qualified for the media relations job, and noted there is no prohibition against private entities hiring family members.[10]

An APM Reports analysis found that while Hegseth ran the MN PAC political action committee, one third of its $15,000 in funds were spent on Christmas parties for families and friends. Campaign finance laws in Minnesota do not prohibit such spending. Less than half of the PAC's resources was spent on candidates, and as of March 2018, the PAC had closed its account with the state board.[10]

Punditry[

During the 2016 Republican primaries, he initially backed Marco Rubio, then Ted Cruz and ultimately Donald Trump.[10] Hegseth has since then emerged as a strong Trump supporter.[10] As a Fox News personality, he has frequently attacked the media, Democrats and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigationinto Russian interference in the 2016 election.[10] Hegseth has appeared on Fox News Channel, as well as on CNN and MSNBC.[15]

Fox News[

Hegseth joined Fox News as a contributor in 2014.[10]

On June 14, 2015, Hegseth threw an axe which struck and injured a member of the West Point Band.[16] During a live broadcast on Fox & Friends promoting an upcoming segment about the Stihl Timbersports Series, the co-host threw a double-bit lumberjack axe that overshot the wooden target and hit drummer SFC Jeff Prosperie across his right elbow.[17] The axe head hit broadside on the arm such that Prosperie narrowly missed significant injury, but he did sustain minor cuts across the wrist as the axe tumbled after the initial impact. Co-ordination of the event and broadcast between the West Point Band and Fox had assured that there would be no axe throwing while the service members were performing behind the target.[18]

In September 2017, Hegseth interviewed President Donald Trump. Hegseth received criticism for allowing Trump to make false claims without challenging him.[19][20] According to an opinion column in The Washington Post, Hegseth's "interview was notable for one reason: a viewer who got most of his news from Fox heard only scant details about the contents of Cassidy-Graham. As with the previous attempts to partially repeal the ACA, the bill was covered less for its substance than as a question of whether Republicans could deliver a "win" on a key issue."[21] Philip Bump of the Washington Post provided a list of all notable claims that Trump made during the interview that, in his opinion, warranted follow-up questions which Hegseth never asked.[22] Hegseth was speculatively mentioned as a hypothetical replacement for VA Secretary David Shulkin.[23]

In May 2018, Hegseth mocked The New York Times for ostensibly not covering a story about the capture of five ISIS leaders, referring to the paper as the "failing New York Times".[24] However, it was The New York Times that broke the story in question.[24]

In December 2018, Hegseth co-hosted a several-hour New Year's Eve program with Fox Business Network's Kennedy,during which a pre-recorded telephone interview between him and President Trump was broadcast.[25][26]

In May 2019, it was reported that Trump was considering pardoning several US military service members who had been charged with war crimes, including a veteran set to stand trial forshooting indiscriminately at civilians, hitting a girl and an elderly man,[27] as well as fatally stabbing a captured teenage Islamic State member while he was receiving medical treatment. The Daily Beast and CNN later reported that Hegseth had for months sought to convince Trump to pardon these individuals. At the same time, Hegseth was discussing these cases on Fox News without disclosing that he had advised Trump to pardon them.[28][29] In November 2019, Trump pardoned three service members accused or convicted of war crimes. Shortly before Trump announced his decision, Hegseth suggested that Trump was about to take "imminent action" in the cases.[30][31]

In July 2019, Hegseth said that one of the Muslim members of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, had a "Hamas agenda".[32] In August 2019, Hegseth expressed support for the far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer's congressional campaign, and linked to her donation page.[33]

In August 2019, he lamented that "young kids voting" are worried about the adverse effects of climate change. Hegseth also criticized universities for teaching students about "environmentalism and radical environmentalism" rather than a "real threat" such as "radical Islam".[34]

In January 2020, Hegseth expressed strong support for President Trump's decision to kill Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.[35] He also called on Trump to bomb the Iranian homeland, including cultural sites in Iran if they were storing weapons.[36]

In February 2020, amid the spread of the coronavirus to the United States, Hegseth said that Democrats were "rooting for coronavirus to spread. They’re rooting for it to grow. They’re rooting for the problem to get worse."[37]

Personal life[

Hegseth was divorced from his first wife, Meredith Schwarz, in 2009. He married his second wife, Samantha Deering, in 2010; they have three children.[10] During his marriage to Deering, Hegseth had a daughter with Fox executive producer Jennifer Rauchet, with whom he was having an extramarital relationship, in August 2017.[10] He and Deering divorced in August 2017. Hegseth and Rauchet, who has three young children from her first marriage, married in August 2019.[38]

In February 2019, Hegseth joked on Fox & Friends that he didn't think he had washed his hands in ten years. He explained: "I inoculate myself. Germs are not a real thing. I can't see them, therefore they're not real."[39]

In early August 2019, Hegseth swam across the Hudson River with Navy SEALs in support of military veterans.[40]

Hegseth is a Christian.[41]

Bibliography[edit]

Hegseth wrote the foreword to the 2017 book The Case Against the Establishment (ISBN 978-1-6826-1474-7) by Nick Adams and Dave Erickson.[42] His own books include:

Awards, decorations, and badges

....

---

 Pete Hegseth attacks the International Criminal Court: “These international bodies can turn and can turn against you”

03/06/20 9:58 AM EST

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-friends-agrees-trump-coronavirus-hoax

JEDEDIAH BILA (CO-HOST): I want to ask you, though, about the president. What can the president do at a time like this? Because obviously he has an interest in stabilizing the market. You see now if you take a look the Dow is down. The S&P [500] is down. It's very concerning to a lot of people out there. What should he be saying?

STUART VARNEY (FOX BUSINESS HOST): He should be reassuring the American people as he has been doing that this administration can take care of and contain this virus. Remember, no deaths. OK. We got new cases, but no deaths. We've quarantined people. We're testing people. That's what the president should be telling us, and he is telling us that.

Personally, I get really annoyed when I hear the Democrats, going after the president, try to make out that the virus is his fault. And they are doing it for electoral advantage and I think that is absolutely reprehensible. You need an opposition, you need to hold the president accountable. But what they are doing is denigrating the administration's efforts. Trying to tear down the president, not for the benefit of the country, but for their electoral benefit.

BILA: We actually have some sound --

DEAN CAIN (CO-HOST): Exactly.

BILA: -- related right to what you are saying.

CAIN: He spoke about this last night in Charleston, South Carolina.

[CLIP]

DONALD TRUMP (PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES): Politicizing the coronavirus.

...

You say how is President Trump doing? They go, "Oh, not good, not good." They have no clue. They don't have any clue. They can't even count their votes in Iowa. They can't even count.

...

[djt]: One of my people came up to me and said, "Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn't work out too well." They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. They tried it over and over. They have been doing it since you got in. It's all turning. They lost. It's all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.

[END CLIP]

PETE HEGSETH (CO-HOST): He can't resist.

VARNEY: Look, I agree with that. Look, Russia, Russia, Russia. Impediment to justice. Impeachment, and now the virus. One thing after another to denigrate and slime our president. Utterly wrong.

HEGSETH: You see the misinformation, too. Democrats -- the AP had to fact check Democrats who were saying that the president's cut the CDC budget which it hasn't been reduced under the Trump presidency. They're seizing on anything.

VARNEY: And you have this irrational criticism of the president. [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], for example, denigrating Vice President [Mike] Pence who is in charge of the containment effort saying he is a science denier. Please. Come on.

BILA: Yeah. And the reality, I mean, the truth is --

VARNEY: And Senator [Elizabeth] Warren was talking about the mess of this containment effort. Excuse me, show me the mess.

BILA: Yeah.

VARNEY: I don't see any deaths. I see a good strong containment effort.

BILA: Yeah, the truth is, whatever the president would have done, the media would have been there to criticize him.

:{:{}:

}:

===

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/pete-hegseth/pete-hegseth-democrats-and-media-are-agents-russia-not-donald-trump

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, U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer (no relation to the white nationalist of the same name) was forced outafter losing a power struggle with Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has been aggressively lobbying the Trump administration to intervene in the cases of multiple convicted war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had been accused of war crimes during a 2017 deployment to Iraq. Hegseth devoted numerous Fox & Friends segments to their causes, repeatedly hosted their family members and lawyers to ask the president for pardons, and privately urged the president to do so.⁠

Gallagher was acquitted in July on charges related to the murder of a teenage prisoner of war, but was demoted after being convicted of posing for photos with the body. While Trump pardoned the Navy SEAL and restored his rank, Navy officials subsequently sought to convene a review board to remove Gallagher from his elite unit and strip him of his Trident pin. This process reportedly continued even after Trump tweeted his disapproval of the move.

Following several attacks from Hegseth on Spencer and the Navy during the course of Sunday morning’s Fox & Friends broadcast, Trump announced his displeasure with the Navy and Spencer’s termination on Twitter.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/why-christian-nationalism-is-an-existential-threat-to-democracy/

no lnx

Why Christian nationalism is an existential threat to democracy

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly November 26, 2019

It probably shouldn’t surprise us that, after hearing from witnesses who testified consistently that the president attempted to bribe a foreign head of state in order to get dirt on a political opponent, the needle hasn’t moved on those who oppose impeachment. We’ve been here before. On several occasions, hopes have been raised that this is the moment Trump’s enablers will finally abandon him. But it has never happened.

Given that the president’s base of support comes primarily from white evangelicals, it is important to understand Christian nationalism in order to explain their loyalty. One of the court evangelicals, Franklin Graham, recently gave us a window into that world.

During his November 21 interview with Graham, Metaxas, a Salem Radio Network talk-show host, asked the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, “What do you think of what is happening now? I mean, it’s a very bizarre situation to be living in a country where some people seem to exist to undermine the president of the United States. It’s just a bizarre time for most Americans.”

Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, responded, “Well, I believe it’s almost a demonic power that is trying—”

At which point Metaxas interjected, “I would disagree. It’s not almost demonic. You know and I know, at the heart, it’s a spiritual battle.”

Graham agreed…

As Peter Wehner summarized, the message is that, in this “spiritual battle,” we all have to chose sides.

For Graham and Metaxas, it appears that agreeing with them equates to agreeing with God—and disagreeing with them, at least when it comes to Donald Trump, means doing the work of the evil one.

For these Christian nationalists, it’s not enough to say, “God is on our side.” If you don’t agree with them, you are engaged with a demonic power. There is no authoritarian tool more controlling than the one that wields the power to define the playing field like that. It is a pronouncement that leaves no room for debate or nuance. You’re either all in or all out. Anyone who buys into what they’re saying has no choice but to defend Trump. To do otherwise is a pathway to eternal doom with the devil.

To further the argument that God is on Trump’s side, Rick Perry recently opined about how the president is the “chosen one.”

Courtney Hagle

@CourtneyHagle

Fox & Friends preview an interview with Rick Perry, where he says that Trump is "the chosen one" and "sent by God to do great things"

Pete Hegseth: "God has used imperfect people forever," but what Trump "has withstood is unlike what really any other mortal could understand"

Embedded video

Apparently, Perry also said that Obama was chosen by God. It’s funny how we never heard that when Obama was actually president. But what Perry was articulating is a theological argument for the omnipotence of God, who has unlimited power to control everything. Leaving that one aside for the moment, it is worth examining the rhetoric Perry used.

“I actually gave the president a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago, and I shared it with him,” he continued. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people that say you said you were the chosen one, and I said, ‘You were.’”

“I said, ‘If you’re a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government,’” he added.

He was comparing Trump to kings in the Old Testament and referred to God’s plan for those who rule over us. That goes to the heart of something Katherine Stewart wrote about Christian nationalists.

The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times…

I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

As you can see, Graham wasn’t the first one to claim that “resistance to Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.” Stewart has been hearing that one for a few years.

We have to grapple with the fact that Christian nationalists are launching a “direct attack on democracy itself.” That is because real democracy poses a threat to the kind of authoritarianism they embrace. The roots of that were explained by William Barr during his speech to the law school at Notre Dame. He began by articulating his own view of human nature.

Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large.

No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.

Barr goes on to suggest that, when the founders talked about self government, they didn’t mean what we think they did.

In the words of Madison, “We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…”

This is really what was meant by “self-government.” It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislative body. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.

But if individual rapacity is the problem, what is the source of those restraints?

[T]o control willful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

In short, in the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people – a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.

When you combine that with the belief among Christian nationalists that the only true religion is Christianity, you have the antithesis of democratic pluralism. Instead, you have authoritarian theocracy. That loops us back to Franklin Graham and the rest of the court evangelicals, who take it upon themselves to define who is on God’s side and who is doing the work of the devil.

Years ago, Sara Robinson captured what it takes to leave that kind of authoritarian mindset.

We must never, ever underestimate what it costs these people to let go of the beliefs that have sustained them…Externally, it always means the loss of your community; and often the loss of jobs, homes, marriages, and blood relatives as well. Internally, it requires sifting through every assumption you’ve ever made about how the world works, and your place within it; and demands that you finally take the very emotional and intellectual risks that the entire edifice was designed to protect you from. You have to learn, maybe for the first time, to face down fear and live with ambiguity.

While the loss of community can be traumatic, the prospect of “sifting through every assumption you’ve ever made about how the world works” is overwhelming. As she points out, the entire edifice is designed to protect you from fear and the threat of ambiguity. For most people, scaling that one is too much to ask.

I’m not going to suggest that it is impossible for Trump’s supporters to change their minds. But when we watch them reject one rational case after another, it is important to understand the depths of what binds them, as well as the threat that poses to our democracy.

==

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nearly a year, Fox News host Pete Hegseth -- a veteran who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and also in Guantanamo Bay prison -- has pushed Trump to issue pardons to service members accused or convicted of war crimes. On Friday night, Trump did exactly that.

One of the pardons went to Clint Lorance. Lorance, who was a first lieutenant in the Army, was found guilty in 2013 of second-degree murder of two civilians in Afghanistan. The New York Times reported that nine members of his platoon testified against Lorance at his trial, and several of them contradicted his testimony in their interviews. One of his subordinates told the Times, “One of the first things [Lorance] said to us was, we are going to go in Gestapo-style with night raids, pull people out of houses, make them afraid of us.” It was also reported in Task & Purpose that Lorance ordered his soldiers to shoot a child who attempted to recover the bodies.

Trump specifically overruled concerns from the Department of Defense in issuing these pardons, and they raise grave concerns about the future of the military. Hegseth, for his part, has been clear that he could have been prosecuted for war crimes, saying so on air.

==

~ hoefeller?(stacy abrams pod save million$?)

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-news-joins-scott-walkers-disinformation-campaign-smear-eric-holders-effort-make

A  Fox & Friends segment about redistricting efforts led by former Attorney General Eric Holder falsely characterized his efforts as an attempt to rig elections. Holder is involved with several Democratic groups -- the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), the National Redistricting Foundation (NFR), and the National Redistricting Action Fund (NRAF) -- that are seeking to eliminate the impact of partisan gerrymandering on state and federal elections.

During its October 8 broadcast, Fox & Friends invited formerWisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on air to smear Holder and his group’s efforts. Walker is the face of a group called the National Republican Redistricting Trustthat has fought to preserve partisan gerrymanders that favor Republicans.

Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth introduced the segment by hyping a Wall Street Journal editorial that called Holder’s initiatives a “redistricting coup”and claiming that the former attorney general is leading efforts to “turn districts blue in time for the elections,” citing a recent legal victory one of Holder’s groups had in North Carolina. Walker then provided a litany of false or misleading information about what has been going on in that state.

First, some background: North Carolina has an ugly history of Republican legislators drawing maps for elections along racial lines to diminish the power of Black voters. In 2017, the Supreme Court struck down two Republican-drawn congressional maps in the state, upholding a lower court decision that found them to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. However, that ruling did not solve all of the unfairness plaguing elections in North Carolina, where electoral maps were still largely drawn to advantage Republicans. Recently released documents indicate that following the 2017 Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina Republicans continued their racial gerrymandering efforts while lying to the district court overseeing the map-drawing process.

The effects of unfair district maps in North Carolina are obvious: In the 2018 federal elections, Democrats won 50% of the vote statewide but only 23% of the state’s congressional races, taking just three of North Carolina’s 13 U.S. House seats. In the state legislature, Republicans lost the statewide popular vote but still ended up controlling 29 of 50 Senate seats and 66 of 120 House seats.

In response, Holder’s National Redistricting Foundation sued in state court, challenging the state legislative maps as an unlawful partisan gerrymander. In September, NRF won its lawsuit and has followed up by filing a second lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s federal congressional maps along similar lines.

While appearing on Fox & Friends, Walker complained about the NRF lawsuits as part of a “sue until it’s blue mentality,” saying, “So even a state like North Carolina where Republicans are in charge of the Assembly and the Senate, the two houses there, they’ve gone to court.” But the whole point of those lawsuits is that the current makeup of the state legislature represents an ill-gotten advantage for Republicans precisely because they achieved their majorities using unfair district maps. Under Walker’s tortured logic, the fact that Republicans were able to achieve majorities in the state legislature by using obviously unfair maps is reason enough to keep those same partisan maps to decide future elections. (Walker has deployed similar mind-bending logic before when defending unfair election outcomes in his home state of Wisconsin.)

[vid]

Then Walker got conspiratorial.He said that Holder’s team “now controls who’s on the Supreme Court in North Carolina.” Walker seemed to be referencing the fact that in North Carolina, Supreme Court positions are determined by partisan elections (which are decided by a statewide vote, and therefore can’t be gerrymandered to give candidates supported by Holder or anyone else an unfair map advantage). A wide range of interest groups can participate in these state Supreme Court races through outside spending, but again, that doesn’t give Holder’s groups any special ability to determine Supreme Court election outcomes. 

Walker’s bad-faith attacks on Holder continued throughout the segment. In once instance, after Hegseth extensively quoted a statement from Holder at NRF, Walker falsely claimed, “The irony is if you look at the forming files of the IRS they actually say, not that they’re fighting for fair maps, they talk about giving Democrats an advantage in this.” In reality, NRF, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, states on IRS forms that the organization “seeks to oppose racial and partisan gerrymandering.”

Towards the end of the segment, Hegseth made the allegation that Holder’s efforts are an attempt to rig elections, claiming that if he is successful, “Election Day becomes sort of a rigged process if the districts are determined beforehand in a partisan way.” Walker responded, “And that’s what Holder wants, he’s not talking about redistricting places like Maryland.”

Setting aside the bizarreness of Hegseth and Walker appearing to agree that partisan gerrymandering is wrong on principle -- given that it is employed far more often by Republican-controlled legislatures -- Walker was lying again. Maryland is a prominent example of an exception to the rule as a state where Democrats have engaged in gerrymandering for unfair partisan gain. But Holder has spoken out about Maryland, comparing unfairness in that state to the unfair maps in North Carolina.

On July 4, Holder published an opinion piece in The Washington Post criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that it has no jurisdiction over legal challenges to partisan gerrymandering. In his piece, Holder said, “As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her powerful and prescient dissent, the partisan gerrymanders in Maryland and North Carolina ‘debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.’”

Walker’s appearance on Fox & Friends is the latest example of the dishonest tactics he employs in his media tour for the National Republican Redistricting Trust. Walker’s go-to argument is that Holder’s groups favor partisan gerrymandering that benefits Democrats, while his own group just wants fair maps. But the real-world actions of the groups indicate just how brazenly dishonest Walker is. For example, in Pennsylvania, Holder backed efforts to have electoral maps drawn in an independent nonpartisan fashion. Walker’s group, however, was also involved in litigation in Pennsylvania, and attempted to preserve a partisan gerrymander that benefitted Republicans. (As governor of Wisconsin, Walker himself participated in drawing unfair maps in that state to benefit his party.)

In essence, Walker is guilty of the very partisan gerrymandering misdeeds he often accuses Holder of participating in -- but in media appearances, he flips reality and his own record to claim the opposite. The only consistency in Walker’s arguments is that he will say anything to give the Republican Party an unfair advantage.

---

==

on Fox News on Sunday, Robert Jeffress — one of President Donald Trump’s far-right white evangelical sycophants — asserted that Trump’s impeachment could cause “a Civil War-like fracture” in the United States. Trump repeated Jeffress’ assertion on Twitter — and got an angry response from a fellow Republican: Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.

Jeffress, pastor at the First Baptist Church in Dallas, is a prominent figure on the Christian Right. And during his Sunday appearance on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” Jeffress insisted to co-hosts Pete Hegseth and Jedediah Bila that Trump has done nothing to deserve impeachment and attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for supporting an impeachment inquiry — stressing, “I do want to make this prediction this morning: if the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office, I’m afraid it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this nation from which this country will never heal.”

On Twitter, Trump quoted Jeffress and zeroed right in on the Civil War

==

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/08/23/convention-states-fires-up-base-for-push-to-rewrite-u-s-constitution

david a cmd

Convention of States Action (COS) kicked off its first “Leadership Summit” in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia today. COS, a project of Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe’s Citizens for Self-Governance, claims that “hundreds” of activists, state directors, and coordinators from all 50 states will attend to get inspired and learn strategies for passing COS resolutions in the states calling for a constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution.

Fifteen states have passed the group’s applications so far, with 17 more states considering the resolution this year, according to COS. Wisconsin recently introduced a COS resolution, which would bump the number up to 18.

A constitutional convention has never been held since the Constitution was adopted, and COS will need 34 states to file applications in order for it to occur. If that happens, COS plans to move an array of sweeping amendments to redefine key parts of the Constitution and radically weaken the federal government.

COS has ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the National Rifle Association, the right-wing militia group Three Percenters, and the Christian nationalist group WallBuilders.

More than 200 civil rights and public interest groups, including the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), signed a letter last year denouncing such constitutional convention calls as “a threat to every American’s constitutional rights and civil liberties.”

Right-Wing Extremists to Speak

Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, from Trump’s beloved Fox & Friends, addressed the crowd this morning, telling them that the Left hates the Constitution, the founding fathers understood that the word of “Jesus Christ our savior” is the guiding force for our country, and that there “is no other freedom-loving bastion in the world that values the individual with God-endowed rights.”

And, referencing the Three Percenters likely in attendance, Hegseth said, “it has always been the one percent or two percent or three percent of people that get it, that are willing to buck the comfiness of their moment and the established norms that everyone is comfortable with, willing to be defiant, willing to stand — be accused of being radical about things that are not radical at all.”

Recently, Hegseth has made some radical comments himself, saying that Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (MI-D) has a “Hamas agenda,” implying that she works with a U.S. designated terrorist organization.

Hegseth has also publicly defended Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s brother Erik Prince’s Blackwater contractors, who were convicted of murdering Iraqi citizens, and has called climate change a “religion” that Democrats use to “control” people.

David Barton warmed up the crowd with a history lecture on the Constitution’s basis in fixed moral standards based on natural law and scripture, and drew applause with his claim that the federal government has “emasculated the states.”

A Christian nationalist with strong anti-LGBT views. Barton once said,

“There’s a passage that I love in Romans 1. … [I]t talks about homosexuality and it says that they will receive in their bodies the penalties of their behavior. … The Bible [is] right every time … and that’s why AIDS has been something they haven’t discovered a cure for or a vaccine for. … And that goes to what God says, ‘Hey you’re going to bear in your body the consequences of this homosexual behavior.'”

Barton founded the group WallBuilders, which has worked with Focus on the Family and the Family Policy Alliance to influence judicial elections and selection rules in states across the country, the Center for Media and Democracy detailed.

WallBuilders also works with the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation to push out Christian-Right model legislation in the mold of ALEC to state lawmakers under the name Project Blitz.

Also in line to speak at the Summit is one of the NRA’s top attorneys, Charles Cooper. Cooper will speak on, “The Real Threat to Gun Rights.” In an email to COS activists, Cooper is quoted as saying:

“The real threat to our constitutional rights today is posed not by an Article V Convention of States, but by an out-of-control federal government, exercising powers that it does not have and abusing powers that it does.”

COS materials in recent years have argued that a constitutional convention could be used to rewrite the Second Amendment in order to make it Supreme-Court-proof.

Others on the agenda to speak include founding board member Eric O’Keefe, former professor Rob Natelson, former U.S. Senator and COS Senior Advisor Tom Coburn, and the right-wing author of Liberty Amendments Mark Levin.

But the stars of the summit are likely to be the actors COS will have play the founding fathers Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington.

Stay tuned to ExposedbyCMD.org for more on the right-wing’s effort to rewrite the Constitution.

---

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/fox-and-friends-bizarrely-claims-climate-change-is-the-lefts-religion-its-how-they-control-your-life/

no lnx

Fox and Friends bizarrely claims climate change is the left’s ‘religion’: It’s how they ‘control your life’

Image via Twitter.

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement August 13, 2019

“Fox and Friends” took a swing at the very real crisis of man-made climate change Tuesday morning, with guest co-host Pete Hegseth saying it’s not a “real threat,” like ISIS.

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt mocked Senator Bernie Sanders for saying climate change is a greater threat to U.S. national security than ISIS (the DoD has made similar observations). Hegseth, who once was on President Donald Trump’s short list to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, launched into a rant.

“The Left says that all the time. This is what they believe – it is their religion,” Hegseth told viewers. They want to fight the weather, the rest of us want to deal with real threats that want to take away our freedom.”

Hegseth then credited President Trump with “destroying ISIS,” while acknowledging there are still “remnants” that need to be addressed. “That’s taking on a real threat directly.”

“Whether it’s hot or cold, the enemy is here, as far as liberals are concerned. It’s all about control for them. That’s why climate change is the perfect enemy. They get to control your life to deal with it, no matter what’s happening,” said Hegseth, who once said “germs are not a real thing,” while bragging he has not washed his hands in ten years.

He then went on to complain that college students aren’t “learning about radical Islam, they’re learning about environmentalism, and radical environmentalism, and they’re being told its the most important thing.”

The highly-respected website Just Security, which is based at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, last year reported that climate change “is a grave threat to national security. Indeed, it may be the threat.” They added it also “exacerbates and accelerates already existing threats.”

Watch Fox and Friends:

Pete Hegseth goes on a rant about The Left trying to “fight the weather” as a means to “control your life,” and that college kids are “not learning about radical Islam, they’re learning about environmentalism.” pic.twitter.com/Y6jKCu7zTd

==

PETE HEGSETH (GUEST CO-HOST): Charlie, there's no doubt kids have worries and anxiety. I mean, just last night, one of my boys was worried whether he'd be on the team with the other two boys in basketball camp this morning. But it's not just families. It's schools are reinforcing this eco-anxiety too by being obsessed with climate change.

CHARLIE KIRK (TURNING POINT USA): That's exactly right. And unfortunately, this is a really important point. Elementary school children spend much more time focusing on climate change and the environment than they do on American history. You'll have fourth and fifth graders --

HEGSETH: True.

KIRK: That will know much more about the idea that the world will end in 10 years than about 1776, the War of 1812, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, or the beauty of the American founding. And that right there can answer the question of how these radical ideas are actually able to spread in our society, when you spend far more time on the idea that the world is going to end in 10 years, which is totally false, and not on the history of our country.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/fox-news-host-accuses-rashida-tlaib-of-having-a-hamas-agenda/

no lnx

Fox News host accuses Rashida Tlaib of having a ‘Hamas agenda’

Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon July 30, 2019

“Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth has accused Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., of having a “Hamas agenda” following her criticisms of Israel.

Fellow Fox News colleague Sean Hannity began a segment of his eponymous primetime show Monday by denouncing the so-called “squad” of four liberal Democratic congresswomen, which in addition to Tlaib includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The group has recently found itself the target of racist Twitter attacks from President Donald Trump.

“Nobody in the Democratic team of hopefuls for 2020 is talking about Nancy Pelosi’s policies,” Hannity told his viewers. “They’re adopting ‘the squad’s’ policies.”

Hannity continued by engaging his colleague Hegseth over the accusations of “radicalism” and “virulent anti-Semitism” he levied against “the squad” earlier in the segment.

“Pete: To me they’re going to help in the end, because it seems like everybody is afraid of them. And they’re so radical and so extreme, and frankly a number of them are quite bigoted,” Hannity told Hegseth. “And I don’t think it’s going to work very well to call America a garbage country; or compare the concentration camps in Nazi Germany to the treatment we’re giving people in facilities down at the border; or to say that Israel has hypnotized the world, and we want to boycott Israel just the way we boycotted the Nazis. I don’t think that’s going to fly.”

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trump pretends to be pro vet, patriots and some of his tough guy possie, but throws them under the bus repeatedly, claims to have fix VA tho choice/pvt pgm actually done by BO?

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Fox News anchor stumps colleague by dismantling his ‘love it or leave it’ rant

Alex HendersonJuly 22, 2019

Fox News’ Pete Hegseth jumped through hoops defending President Donald Trump’s racist assertion that four Democratic congresswomen of color should return to the countries they originally came from when, on…

Fox News’ Pete Hegseth jumped through hoops defending President Donald Trump’s racist assertion that four Democratic congresswomen of color should return to the countries they originally came from when, on Monday, he appeared on a segment of the program “Outnumbered” — and it was Harris Faulkner,[bl woman] an “Outnumbered” co-host, who reminded Hegseth that one can disagree with Trump’s policies without being unpatriotic or anti-American.

...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/06/26/fox-news-host-pete-hegseth-working-profit-college-industry-against-protections-student-veterans/224047

Veterans groups have been asking Congress to close a loophole in the GI Bill that enables for-profit colleges to exploit veterans. The main lobbying group of the scam-plagued industry is fighting back and has recruited Fox News host Pete Hegseth to support their cause. Hegseth has denied that for-profit schools have preyed on veterans, attacked veterans groups as being “really drunk on the swamp,” and said he could potentially lobby President Donald Trump on the issue.

Hegseth also wrote a FoxNews.com opinion piece in support of for-profit colleges, saying they are “improving the lives of veterans every day!” But Fox News didn’t disclose that Hegseth is working with the lobbying group.

Hegseth is a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. He also regularly advises Trump on military issues, including lobbying the president to pardon accused and convicted war criminals. Trump at one point last year reportedly considered Hegseth to serve as secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU) is a trade association that serves as the main lobbying organization of the for-profit college industry. The group spent $362,000 lobbying the federal government in 2018.

The for-profit college industry has been plagued by reports of scams and fraudulent advertising that lead to many students ending up with essentially worthless degrees and large debts. Multiple states have taken action againstthe industry while the Trump administration has protected it. As NBC News reported in April, the Obama administration had “created new rules intended to help rein in the worst-performing schools and to protect taxpayer dollars. … Now, the Trump Administration is trying to overturn those rules — and veterans and low-income Americans are the most at risk. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has begun a months long process to unwind the Obama-era rules, easing oversight of for-profits’ use of tax dollars and protections for defrauded students.”

The industry has also exploited veterans over the years. In a February New York Times op-ed, Veterans Education Success President Carrie Wofford and Student Veterans of America Executive Vice President James Schmeling explained that for-profit colleges target veterans because they “milk a federal loophole that allows them to count G.I. Bill benefits as private funds”:

Why are veterans the targets? Because for-profit colleges milk a federal loophole that allows them to count G.I. Bill benefits as private funds, offsetting the 90 percent cap they otherwise face on their access to taxpayer-supported federal student aid. Nearly two dozen state attorneys general have said this accounting gimmick — known as the “90/10 loophole” — “violates the intent of the law.”

Hundreds of for-profit schools are almost entirely dependent on federal revenue, and if the 90/10 loophole were closed, they would be in violation of this federal regulation. Taxpayers, in other words, are largely propping up otherwise failing schools.

In December, a damning Department of Veterans Affairs internal audit estimated the risk of G.I. Bill waste was exceptionally high at for-profit schools, which received over 75 percent of improper G.I. Bill payments. The report highlighted the schools’ deceptive advertising campaigns used to recruit veterans and warned that the government will waste $2.3 billion in improper payments over the next five years if changes are not made to reel in the abuse. ...As a result of systematic problems, veterans groups have urged Congress to close the 90/10 loophole.

In response, CECU recently formed Veterans for Career Education, which it claims “supports the right of veterans to use their earned education benefits to gain career skills at the college or institution of their choice.” CECU has also recruited Hegseth, an Army veteran, as a public face of its campaign.

Hegseth gave a June 3speech in New Orleans, LA, for CECU, during which he announced that he was working with the organization and attacked critics of the for-profit education industry.

Hegsethsaid that he’s “so excited to be working with” Michael Dakduk, a Marine Corps veteran who is CECU’s executive vice president, director of government relations, and a lobbyist for the organization. Hegseth latersaid: “I’m all-in on this effort. I cannot wait to get even more involved, go to Washington, be with this organization, be with the vets, travel around the country, put pressure on the folks that deserve to have pressure put on them.”

During his speech, Hegsethoffered an unapologetic defense of the for-profit schools industry, stating, “The fact that profit is made only makes these schools better”:

PETE HEGSETH: There’s a condemnation of profit. Since when did profit become a dirty word? There’s a belief that if you’re making money that’s a bad thing. I think the fact that profit is made only makes these schools better because it means you treat your students -- and having talked to a number of you before I came up here, there’s a beloved feeling toward the students you have in your institutions. They’re not just students, they’re also customers and as customers, you want to serve and meet their needs just like you want to meet the needs of the companies that would hire them in the future. And when you treat someone like a customer, it means you want them to come back. Or you want them to refer new customers to you. There’s an incentive. And if you look -- I’m going to talk a little bit about the VA and my fight against the VA and the VA bureaucracy. When bureaucracies and places treat you like a number, that’s when you are treated poorly because there’s no accountability to treat you like a customer. Profit is a good thing when channeled properly, and I’m not talking about the few cases where folks are messing around and not doing the right thing. Everybody knows that can happen. There’s bad actors in any industry, in any place. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Hegseth laterclaimed that “some of theseextreme leftists, Democrats, unfortunately at this point, they’ll say that these college degrees are mediocre, worthless, that schools prey on vets. These are direct quotes. And you and I both know that is just not true. I can’t get involved in something that I don’t fundamentally believe in.”

He criticized veterans groups,claiming, “There are a lot of veteran organizations in Washington that say they support vets, but they also -- they really just want to get invited to the cocktail parties. They really just want to be loved by both sides. They’re really drunk on the swamp and the power and the access they have there, and they’ve forgotten about all the guys at the VFW post level or the Legion post level who are doing those jobs throughout America. They’re not the ones they serve anymore; it’s the special interests in Washington that they serve.”

Hegseth spoke about his relationship with Trump,stating that he thinks “if anything were to ever pass in the House, in the Senate right now that restricted veterans choice it would get the fastest … veto stamp or pen you’ve ever seen. So, right now you've got a president that would veto the bad stuff. And if he ever gave me a call -- and sometimes he does -- I’d tell him that.”

Hegseth also wrote a June 25 FoxNews.com opinion piece defending for-profit colleges, writing: “I’ve met these veterans. I’ve met these college administrators. Nobody is being duped. In fact, to the contrary, these schools are improving the lives of veterans every day!” He additionally attacked Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) for introducing legislation seeking to end the 90/10 loophole and criticized Democratic presidential candidates for allegedly "targeting veterans’ educational choices." The piece did not mention Hegseth’s ties to CECU.

It’s not immediately clear whether the multimillion-dollar lobbying organization is compensating Hegseth for his work. CECU did not respond to a request for comment. But the organization also worked with commentators Newt and Callista Gingrich -- the latter of whom is now the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican -- and compensated at least Callista. According to her financial disclosure report, the organization paid her an amount “exceeding $5,000 in a year.” 

Hegseth’s work on behalf of the for-profit college industry is another example of how Fox News has held the host to a low standard. The network has allowed Hegseth to keynote numerous Republican fundraisers and receive compensation for the speeches. Hegseth also repeatedly interviewed then-2018 Michigan Senate candidate John James on Fox News despite appearing with him at one of those fundraisers. (James is runningfor U.S. Senate in 2020.) 

Posted InEducation, Military Personnel & Veterans

Network/OutletFox News Channel

PersonPete Hegseth

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/fox-news-pete-hegseth-has-been-lobbying-trump-to-pardon-accused-war-criminals-report/

Trump and his sycophants have a way of becoming furious whenever Chris Wallace, Shepard Smith or anyone else at Fox News questions anything the president says or does. Regardless, Fox on the whole is a very Trump-friendly outlet, and a new report by the Daily Beast outlines the ways in which Fox News’ Pete Hegseth has been lobbying for Trump to pardon some accused war criminals.

Asawin Suebsaeng, Sam Brodey and Andrew Kirell, in their Daily Beast report published on May 20, discuss the case of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader who is set to go to trial on May 28 for allegedly shooting civilians in Iraq in 2017. Gallagher is also accused of fatally stabbing a captured member of the terrorist organization ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) who was receiving medical treatment in Iraq that year. And the article notes that Hegseth, a co-host of Fox News’ morning program “Fox and Friends,” has been urging Trump to pardon Gallagher as well as Maj. Mathew Golsteyn (who was accused of murdering an Afghan male detainee and burying the body in 2010).

Hegseth himself is a veteran of the Iraq War and formerly headed the right-wing group Concerned Veterans for America. And according to the Daily Beast’s sources, he has had multiple private conservations with Trump in 2019 and has specifically discussed Gallagher’s case with him.

One of the people interviewed for the Daily Beast’s report was a U.S. Special Forces soldier familiar with Golsteyn’s case. The solider, quoted anonymously, disagreed with the claim that Golsteyn is a “hero,” asserting that “he murdered a dude in cold blood and hid the evidence”—which “is not what we do. He is giving the regiment a bad name…. People like him make people mistrust us.”

The Beast also interviewed a U.S. Green Beret who was highly critical of both Gallagher and Golsteyn and told the publication, “We have a set of principles. That is what separates us. Neither one of the guys weren’t aware of the consequences of their actions.”

The Green Beret, quoted anonymously, went on to say that the “Geneva Conventions provide us with ample opportunity to get rid of the enemy…. Rules of Engagement isn’t based in philosophy, it’s based on law—which they both knew. The character of the individuals allegedly killed doesn’t change the Rules of Engagement.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/fox-news-host-botches-basic-math-and-accuses-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-of-practicing-communism/

“Get a load of this.”

That’s how “Fox & Friends” began its discussion Sunday of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office pay scales, a topic she drew attention to in a tweet on Friday:

Leadership starts with our choices.

That’s why I decided that no one on my staff will make less than $52k/year.

It’s likely one of the highest entry-level salaries on the Hill. We pinch pennies elsewhere, but it’s worth every dime to pay a living wage.https://t.co/IxfNH4632h

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 23, 2019

For “Fox & Friends,” this decision was a choice to “redistribute” the money she is given to pay staffers. In fact, it’s just distribution, not “redistribution,” which typically refers to payments and transfers made through the tax system. The hosts noted that, since Ocasio-Cortez has a fixed set of funds to pay staffers like any other lawmaker, she will have to pay people like her chief of staff a lower wage than is typical to make up for the fact that she’s paying entry-level staffers more.

“She said, ‘Everyone in my office will be paid a living wage,'” said host Peter Hagseth. “‘So I’m going to pay $15 an hour.’ Which means your entry-level intern is 52 grand, while your chief of staff, who has a very important role on a congressional office, now is capped at 80. As opposed to the actual market rate at Capitol Hill, which is closer to $150,000. So everyone’s between 52 and 80. It’s actually socialism and communism on display.”

In such a short rant, Hagseth got so much wrong. Most obviously, getting paid $15 an hour doesn’t amount to a $52,000 salary — it’s about $31,200. He has confused advocacy for a $15 minimum wage for Ocasio-Cortez’s baseline pay. While it’s easy for anyone to make a basic math error on live TV, this mistake is particularly revealing. Anyone familiar with these sorts of pay scales would know immediately that $15 an hour is well below $52,000 a year. Hagseth clearly hasn’t actually spent much time thinking about what these rates actually mean for working people if he can’t make sense of the numbers.

But perhaps more importantly, his claim that Ocasio-Cortez’s more egalitarian, though not equal, pay scales amounts to socialism or communism is pure nonsense. Even in capitalistic societies, some employers will choose different salary structures for various reasons. If you conceive of U.S. lawmakers in a competitive market for staffers, Ocasio-Cortez has simply made a rational decision that she thinks makes sense for her office. By paying higher salaries to entry-level staffers, she may be able to attract more applicants. But the pay scales also reflect her more egalitarian values, which will help her attract the staffers who share those ideals. For Hagseth and others at Fox News, though, the idea that a highly qualified chief-of-staff may be paid less so entry-level staffers could be paid more is a threat to the hierarchies they prefer to see in the world.

Watch the clip below:...

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Fox & Friends host says he hasn’t washed hands in 10 years: ‘Germs are not a real thing — I can’t see them’

Fox News host Pete Hegseth explained on Sunday that he doesn’t wash his hands because “germs are not a real thing.” Following a commercial break, Fox & Friends co-host Jedediah…

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rww

UPDATE (11/13/18): Since the publication of this article, the American Priority conference event page has been modified. The QAnon “expert” panel mentioned in this article has been delisted and some listed speakers who frequently spread the conspiracy theory are no longer listed as conference speakers. Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth no longer appears in the lineup;  American Priority conference’s Alex Phillips tells Right Wing Watch that Hegseth withdrew due to an unexpected family obligation.

Heritage Foundation Distinguished Visiting Fellow Stephen Moore and Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth are scheduled to appear at a conference in Washington, D.C., next month where a panel of believers in the “QAnon” conspiracy theory plan to present. Moore served as an economic adviser to President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The conference was announced earlier this year as an alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which Ali Alexander (also known as “Ali Akbar”), one of the original American Priority conference organizers, said neglected the Trump base, despite a CPAC speaker roster that has included administration officials (including the president himself).

Fox News and Heritage Foundation have not answered Right Wing Watch’s requests for comment.

The current agenda page for the American Priority Conference lists as one of its “conference topics” the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, which surmises that President Donald Trump has ordered someone (or a group of people) with top-level federal security clearance to gradually reveal a secret collaboration between Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller to take down a satanic pedophile ring said to span the globe, and allegedly involves top Democratic leaders. Believers of the conspiracy theory, which revolves around an anonymous figure known only as “Q,” who shares via cryptic riddles posted to an image board notorious for child pornography, believe that Trump will eventually subject such top Democrats as Hillary Clinton to military tribunals.

The American Priority event promises “an open panel discussion from Q Experts.” The website does not contain any additional information about the planned panel. Speakers listed on the conference lineup include YouTube personality Jordan Sather, a prominent producer of QAnon content on YouTube.

Sather, who wasinterviewed on Comedy Central as a QAnon conspiracy theorist, uploads content perpetuating the conspiracy theory almost every single day online, where he has nearly 160,000 subscribers on YouTube. Just this morning, Sather posted an image to Twitter suggesting that news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had been hospitalized with fractured ribs was part of the QAnon conspiracy theory.[grafic]

Dustin Nemos, another QAnon content producer, is also slated to speak at the conference. Another speaker is Kari Baxter Donovan, who once promoted an apparently Q-themed article at Populist Media, which appears to have been deleted, tweeting its link with the tagline,  “Q is for everyone” and the hashtag “#QAnon” hashtag, which she has also used to promote content as recently as November 3.

Another speaker slated for the conference is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted about QAnon on Facebook as recently as November 5. DeAnna Lorraine, who is also appearing at the conference, has tweeted about QAnon, too.

The event also features breakout sessions with other pro-Trump conspiracy theorists including Matt Couch, who’s responsible for spreading lies about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, and Laura Loomer.

The conference is also scheduled to feature presenters known to have had friendly interactions with figures within the white supremacist “alt-right” movement, includingR.C. Maxwell,Jack Posobiec, and Milo Yiannopoulous.

Deputy Director of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA Chris Chmielenski is also slated to speak at the American Priority conference.

Right now, the conference shows only two full sponsors: An entity called American Grassroots Council, Inc., which appears to have only a shell website, and Americans For The Trump Agenda, a project of the United States Public Policy Council, Inc., a 501(c)(4) nonprofit whose principal officer is listed as Emy Delgaudio, an Amway distributor. (Amway is the pyramid-style company founded by Richard DeVos, the late father-in-law of current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.)

This article has been updated for clarity, with a link added to comments by a conference organizer, Ali Alexander, regarding the need for a conference alternative to CPAC. Alex Phillips, who told Right Wing Watch that he is now the “sole owner and organizer” of the American Priority conference, said that Alexander left the project in August.

Tags: Pete Hegseth Stephen Moore conspiracy theories The Storm Fox News ChannelHeritage Foundation

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AN

Fox News host Pete Hegseth on Sunday cautioned former CIA contractor Kris Paronto not to threaten President Barack Obama on live television.

After President Barack Obama railed against President Donald Trump in a set of campaign speeches last week, Paronto, who worked for the CIA during the Benghazi attacks, lashed out at the former president for suggesting that the Republican investigation into Benghazi had been politically motivated.

“It’s disgusting,” Paronto said of Obama’s campaign speeches. “It just raises the bile inside of me. I had a hard tim just watching the speeches. I just wanted to see what he had to say. And when that came across, I just wanted to reach through the screen and just grab him — grab him and choke him.”

“That’s a narcissist for you,” he continued. “He caters to the easily manipulated and I can’t just sit by and not do anything about it, not say something strongly against it. Because honestly, the man is a disgrace, just a complete disgrace.”

Paronto added: “It’s completely offensive and I wish I had that man sitting in front of me right now without his Secret Service.”

The former CIA contractor smacked his hands together as he threatened Obama.

“We’ll be careful with that,” Hegseth warned. “Because he’s a former president.”

“Yeah, I know,” Paronto lamented. “But it doesn’t get yourself away from saying comments when my friends died in front of me.”

Watch the video below from Fox News.....

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apparently no problem with hypocrisy

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/pete-hegseths-rise-to-the-top-of-trumps-favorites-and-the-affair-that-almost-ruined-it/

featured in that photo is Jennifer Rauchet, who is currently the Executive Producer of Fox News Watters World,formerly the Executive Producer ofFox & Friends — she’s also the mother of Hegseth’s child.

Mediaite has learned that Hegseth, who is married, and Rauchet had a baby in August after rumors circulated for months that the two were having a secret affair. Mediaite cannot confirm if Hegseth’s divorce to his wife is yet finalized, though it is our understanding from a source close to the situation that it is “very nearly” completed. We understand that Rauchet has also filed for divorce from her husband and that Rauchet and Hegseth currently share the same apartment. She also has children from her current husband.

Hegseth is a bright and rising star at Fox News, and has been afforded the rare opportunity to interview President Trump when other more stalwart news anchors (such as Bret Baier) have had their presidential interview requests ignored. It’s been quite a rise to fame for Hegseth, who was previously best known for an axe-throwing incident that nearly killed a drum corps member, the clip of which quickly went viral.

Hegseth, a strong conservative voice who often speaks of homespun values that appeal to the God-fearing Middle American audience that regularly tunes into Fox & Friends in droves, has three children with his wife **Samantha Hegseth**, with whom he has been married for seven years.

Rauchet, a well regarded show runner at Fox News, was reportedly moved to Watters Worldto create reasonable distance between the two once Fox News executives had caught wind of the previously unreported relationship.

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"swamp" tax bill?

In the wee hours of Friday morning, the Senate gave final approval to the $1.3-trillion spending bill that fleshed out that budget agreement. Trump had grumbled about the plan earlier in the week, and on Wednesday, when a snow storm shut down most of Washington, House Speaker Paul Ryan had gone to cajole Trump into supporting the bill.

Ryan thought he had prevailed. Even though the bill rejected the vast majority of Trump's budget proposals — including virtually all the cuts in domestic programs — and provided very little money for his proposed border wall, it did fund his top priority, the huge increase in spending for the military. Based on the assurances Ryan received, the House passed the bill Thursday morning; the Senate followed suit in the wee hours of Friday.

Then Trump sent out his tweet. Perhaps he was responding to Pete Hegseth, the Fox commentator, who denounced the bill on "Fox & Friends," Trump's favorite morning show. (Hegseth, by the way, is a leading candidate to replace Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin if Trump decides to sack him.)

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-eyes-fox-and-friends-personality-pete-hegseth-to-take-over-veterans-affairs/2018/03/15/f8d03ef6-284e-11e8-b79d-f3d931db7f68_story.html?utm_term=.6bd39e665f0c

no link many

Trump eyes ‘Fox & Friends’ personality Pete Hegseth to take over Veterans Affairs

Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth arrives at Trump Tower in New York City in November 2016. He is said to be among those President Trump is considering to replace Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, who has fallen from favor with the administration. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

By Lisa Rein March 15 Email the author

Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, a conservative voice on veterans’ policy, has emerged as a leading candidate to replace embattled Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, who has fallen from favor with the Trump administration, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Hegseth, 37, is co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” a platform he has used to push his vision of a health-care system with a drastically smaller government footprint and a larger share of private care. He has railed against Shulkin and members of Congress in both political parties for their moderate approach to offering veterans access to private doctors.

Hegseth is an Iraq War veteran who was previously executive director of the conservative advocacy groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, which is backed by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

Concerned Veterans has proved to be an influential force in the administration. But Hegseth’s views on reforming the troubled agency are considered extreme even by some Republicans in Congress, and it is unclear if he could win Senate confirmation if President Trump decides to fire Shulkin.

Hegseth has been a confidant of Trump’s, who watches his Fox News show and frequently calls him to discuss veterans’ policy. Hegseth has dined at the White House and, during an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Shulkin last week, the president called Hegseth to seek his counsel on pending legislation that would expand private care.

Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin has had a productive first year, but now a leadership rift is threatening his position and the agency's agenda. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

[‘It’s killing the agency’: Ugly power struggle paralyzes Trump’s plan to fix veterans’ care]

Trump has not met with Hegseth about the job. But the president has soured on Shulkin, the only Obama-era holdover in his Cabinet, amid widely reported turmoil within VA’s senior ranks. The president has told aides he may replace Shulkin as part of a broader shake-up that began Tuesday with his firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Other possible candidates to run VA include Jeff Miller, a retired Republican congressman from Florida who was chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee and now works as a lobbyist, according to sources close to the administration. While the president discussed the turmoil at VA in a meeting Monday with Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Perry told reporters Wednesday that he is not interested in the job and that he is not considered a candidate.

Hegseth, reached late Wednesday, declined to comment. A former infantry soldier, he told The Washington Post last week that Shulkin “has talked a good game on Choice,” referring to an existing program that allows veterans to see private doctors, but with restrictions. “But he’s sided with the permanent bureaucracy, the traditional veterans’ groups and the unions.”

A Minnesota native, Hegseth was vetted to run the sprawling veterans’ agency after Trump was elected in 2016. But he was considered too inexperienced to run the government’s second-largest bureaucracy, which employs 360,000. He also is disliked by traditional veterans’ advocacy groups, which fear a downsized VA and a privatized system, and which would probably mount a strong campaign against his nomination.

Shulkin, 58, a physician and former hospital executive who ran the Veterans Health Administration under President Barack Obama, won unanimous Senate confirmation last year. He has racked up a number of bipartisan wins for the administration in Congress, but has clashed with VA’s senior political appointees installed by the White House. The core issue on which they disagree is the degree to which veterans should be able to seek private care at government expense. About 30 percent of VA’s medical appointments are now handled by private doctors.

The tensions spilled into public view in February following an investigation by the agency’s inspector general, who admonished the secretary for a business trip he took to Europe with his wife and top staff.

[VA chief Shulkin, staff misled ethics officials about European trip, report finds]

Shulkin could not be reached for comment. During testimony Thursday on Capitol Hill, he was asked by lawmakers whether he’s become distracted by the feud or faced pressure from the administration to privatize veterans’ care. The secretary said that he remains focused and that the only pressure he faces is “to fix this system.”

It’s unclear how long Shulkin plans to stay in the job, though. His allies say he is focused on moving the Choice legislation through Congress and on signing the first phase of a massive contract to overhaul VA’s outdated electronic health records system. A sticking point has been how a new system would connect veterans’ medical records with those of private doctors.

Hegseth has been critical of some senators whose votes he would need for confirmation. As the Senate debated legislation to expand the Choice program in November, he tweeted about Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee chairman Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.): “Worst part about this is that so-called Republican @SenatorIsakson voted WITH socialist @SenSanders to block MORE health care choice for veterans. Sanders wants to trap vets in @DeptVetAffairs and so do Swamp creature ‘Republicans’ like Isakson.”

Asked to comment on a possible Hegseth nomination, Isakson spokeswoman Amanda Maddox said, “We don’t comment on hypotheticals.”

The Koch political network has announced plans to spend substantial money to target incumbent Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections, among them Sen. Jon Tester, (D-Mont.), the committee’s ranking Democrat.

Tester, a Shulkin supporter, said in a recent statement, “Right now, what the veterans of this country need is a leadership team at VA and in the White House who will help us .?.?. improve access to quality VA health care. That means we need a Secretary who works for our veterans, not for the Koch brothers.”

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https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/29/headlines/fired_veterans_affairs_secretary_says_he_was_fired_for_opposing_privatization_of_agency

turmoil in the White House continues, as President Trump fired Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin and said he’d replace him with White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, a rear admiral in the Navy. Dr. Jackson has no experience running a large agency. The Department of Veterans Affairs is the federal government’s second-largest department, with 360,000 employees. Shulkin had been facing criticism for various ethics violations, including using taxpayer money to pay for his wife’s airfare during a trip to Europe last summer. In a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday,Shulkin says he’s actually being ousted because of his opposition to privatizing the Veterans Affairs agency.He wrote, “They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed. That is because I am convinced that privatization is a political issue aimed at rewarding select people and companies with profits, even if it undermines care for veterans.”

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-secretive-trump-lobby-wants-profit-breakup-iraq

Ex-Bush administration officials with pro-Trump leanings have forged a secret alliance with a former private Iraqi Pentagon contractor who is a member of one of Iraq’s wealthiest dynasties. Their mission is to promote the breakup of Iraq as the only viable way to defeat the Islamic State. They have achieved partial success: on Monday, the Trump administration announced a seismic shift in U.S. policy toward the possibility of Iraq’s dissolution.

Yet this network has been intimately connected to Cambridge Analytica (the technology firm that ran Trump’s election campaign), entities that have sponsored ISIS and other Islamist militants, as well as to ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers — who might benefit from the breakup of the country. If you want an inside glimpse into how Deep State 2.0 under Trump is working, this is it. It’s all about networks of influence, vested interests and manipulation of public opinion, in the U.S. and Iraq, in particular. But it’s also about oil and raw materials, and how in some ways, sectarian tensions represent only the surface of deeper drivers of conflict.

By perusing documents, speaking to sources and digging into obscure public records, Insurge Intelligence was able to follow a thread that has so far only been guessed at: what is driving the Trump administration’s thinking on Iraq, a country the U.S. invaded and occupied in 2003, and where it still fights an endless "war on terror"?

A window into the answer comes from a little-known U.S.-Iraqi network, operating through the front of a supposedly patriotic American campaign group. The network was active through the latter half of 2016, coinciding with the final stages of presidential campaigning, and focused on opposing President Obama’s Iraq policy.

The locus of the activity is an organization called the Committee to Destroy ISIS, set up in July 2016 by Sam Patten. Patten served in the George W. Bush administration as a senior State Department advisor from 2008 to 2009, and previously was Bush’s presidential campaign coordinator in 2000. He is executive director of the Committee, which describes itself as a group of Americans and Iraqis campaigning for the western Sunni region of Iraq to achieve independence from the central government in Baghdad.

In October 2016, Patten’s Committee to Destroy ISIS provided financial support to the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington DC think-tank with direct ties to the Trump transition team, to produce a report which calls for the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines.

The curious implications of the connection between Patten and the Hudson Institute report were first highlighted in October 2016 by Ali Hadi al-Musawi for 1001IraqiThoughts. The report, "West Iraq: The Search for Leaders and Leverage," describes itself as a "feasibility study" of western Iraq becoming an independent or autonomous Sunni statelet. The proposal would end up giving neighboring Saudi Arabia significant influence on the envisioned statelet.

The idea of breaking up Iraq is not new. It was, according to high-level sources in Jordan, actively discussed by Bush administration officials based on a vague plan brokered by Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a year before the 2003 invasion. Officials talked about engineering the sectarian partition of Iraq into three autonomous cantons for Sunnis, Kurds and Shi’as. This could make it easier for the U.S. to control the country and access the oil-rich regions.

The plan never left the drawing board, but the strategic thinking behind it lingered and continued to surface in neoconservative planning for the future of the Middle East. This thinking seeped across party political lines and reared its head repeatedly among Democrats. In 2006, Joe Biden, as the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, advocated splitting Iraq into three along sectarian divisions. Since then, pundits and policymakers have circulated the idea. But the U.S. government never formally adopted it as even a potential scenario ,  until now.

The lead author of the Hudson Institute report is Michael Pregent, with research assistance provided by Kevin Truitte. Pregent is a former intelligence adviser to General David Petraeus who served in Iraq and heads up a separate campaign group known as Veterans Against The Deal (VATD), set up to oppose the nuclear deal with Iran brokered by the Obama administration.

VATD launched in late 2015 with a million-dollar ad campaign against the Iran deal, claiming it would give Iran billions of dollars to fund terrorism in the Middle East. But the group did not disclose its donors.

To be sure, Iran has played an increasingly abysmal role in escalating atrocities in Iraq and Syria, fueling anti-Sunni sectarianism and, in turn, emboldening anti-Shi’a extremists. Yet conversely, Michael Pregent and his backers appear to have a curious blindspot on the role of Turkey and the Gulf kingdoms in supporting extremists linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The Koch-Bush-Trump nexus

At its launch, VATD’s board members included Pete Hegseth, CEO of another pro-Republican campaign group, Concerned Veterans for America. Hegseth’s group was financed almost entirely by the Koch brothers’ $400 million political donor network.

A year later, Hegseth met with Donald Trump as a potential candidate for the post of Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He didn’t get the job. But Michael Flynn, Trump’s one-time National Security Advisor (before his untimely resignation in February) was also previously an advisor to VATD.

VATD’s PR campaign was run by a Washington DC PR firm, Javelin DC, founded by Matt Latimer, President George W. Bush’s deputy director of speechwriting and chief speechwriter to former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Javelin’s co-founding partner is Keith Urbahn, who served as Rumsfeld’s chief of staff.

VATD executive director Michael Pregent is also closely connected to the Center for Security Policy, a Washington DC think-tank founded and run by former Reagan defense official Frank Gaffney.Pregent frequently appeared as a guest on Gaffney’s CSP ‘Secure Freedom’ radio podcast from 2015 to 2016.

Gaffney — a staunch advocate of the Obama Muslim birther conspiracy theory — was asked by Trump to help him select his national security team, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The Trump team denied that Gaffney formally advised the transition, but did not confirm or deny whether he had met with Trump.

Pregent declined to comment when asked whether he agreed with Gaffney’s bizarre conspiracy theories.

Cambridge Analytica

In their Hudson Institute report, Pregent and his co-author Truitte “acknowledge support from the Committee to Destroy ISIS, which helped defray expenses incurred during the preparation of this study.”

One of Donald Trump’s senior foreign policy advisors at the time of publication was George Papadopoulos, a former research associate at the Hudson Institute from 2011 to 2015. During his Hudson Institute tenure, Papadopoulos worked under Richard Weitz, director of the think-tank’s Center for Political-Military Analysis.

Sam Patten, whose Committee to Destroy ISIS funded the Hudson Institute feasibility study for the breakup of Iraq, has his own ties to the Trump administration.

Patten’s biography on the website of his lobbying firm, Office of Sam Patten LLC, describes him as having worked with “one of London’s most innovative strategic communications companies to introduce new technologies and methodologies to US campaigns during the 2014 congressional cycle. This beta run of a cutting-edge electoral approach included taking micro-targeting to the next level. Currently this approach is being adopted by at least one major US presidential candidate.”

It’s now well-known that the London-based technology firm engaged in presidential campaigning in this way was Cambridge Analytica. The company, which has become notorious for its role in supporting Trump’s presidential campaign, previously supported the campaigns of Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

A spokesperson for the firm told me that Patten had indeed worked for Cambridge Analytica at the Oregon office of its parent company, SCL Group. Patten had got involved early when the firm was actively fine-tuning its methodologies in 2014 before the presidential campaign.

Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, is on the board of Cambridge Analytica, which is now actively using its close ties to Trump’s inner circle to pitch for new government contracts.

Michael Flynn — who advised Michael Pregent’s VATD — also served as an advisor to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, to help expand its contracting work. Under Trump, the firm has just finalized a contract with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center on a new counter-extremism program.

Among the firm’s main financiers is billionaire Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s chief political donors, and previously a key funder for Bannon’s Breitbart News, among other projects.

In 2014, Bannon was the Mercer family’s political advisor, and played a key role in rolling out Cambridge Analytica for the US Republican election scene — precisely when Patten worked there.

In July 2016, the month Patten launched the Committee to Destroy ISIS, Patten was interviewed by Steve Bannon on Breitbart News’ radio show to discuss the Committee’s vision for a partitioned Iraq. Breitbart also published an op-ed by Patten putting forward the same views.

Asked about his relationship with Steve Bannon, and whether he believed the Trump administration might end up taking on the Committee’s proposals for a breakup of Iraq, Patten said: “One outcome of the US election is the likely change in approach to foreign policy. The new administration includes voices that oppose making America’s regional policy a hostage to a single Gulf nation’s ambition, and has been actively calling for new ideas.”

Patten also heaped praise on the White House chief strategist: “We met Mr. Bannon last summer and he struck us a thoughtful person, an avid student of history and an original thinker. We hope that new thinking may challenge the cynical, status quo of recent years….”

I asked the U.S. State Department whether it supported the Committee’s position, or still stood by the traditional U.S. position of previous administrations supporting a unified Iraq. A spokesperson sent me an excerpt from Monday’s press briefing, in which an official confirmed that the Trump administration was moving to accommodate the possibility of a divided Iraq: “With respect to the unity of Iraq, you’re right, that is something we make a point of saying. But ultimately, these are all internal political discussions that Iraq needs to have with all ethnic groups resident in the country.”

This is the first time that the State Department has officially declared the U.S. government’s willingness to contemplate the prospect of an Iraq breakup of some kind. The reality on the ground is that the process is already underway, but the Trump administration’s position is a major step toward formalizing it.

But former Bush PR guru Sam Patten is not just connected to the Trump administration. He simultaneously works with certain Sunni factions in Iraq — some of whom were suspected by U.S. intelligence of having ties to the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Flirting with insurgents

In 2014, as Iraqi writer Ali Hadi al-Musawi reported, Patten separately registered as a foreign agent on behalf of the Sunni-led Al Arabiya bloc, an Iraqi political coalition formed by then-deputy prime minister of Iraq, Saleh al-Mutlaq. Under Saddam, al-Mutlaq was a member of the Ba’ath Party until the late 1970s when he was expelled for insisting that five Shi’ite men should receive a fair trial.

Since then, however, al-Mutlaq unofficially maintained contacts with the Ba’ath Party on many levels, according to Jordanian writer Mohammed Hussainy. Disclosure filings confirm that during this time, Patten was paid from al-Mutlaq’s Jordanian office in Amman.

According to the Daily Beast, “some in U.S. intelligence have suspected him [al-Mutlaq] of having ties to Sunni insurgents over the years.”

In January 2007, U.S. forces were reportedly fired on from al-Mutlaq’s office in Baghdad, during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda safehouse. “One of the buildings from which Coalition Forces received heavy enemy fire, including grenade launches, was later identified as belonging to Dr. Saleh al-Mutlaq,” said a US statement. Al-Mutlaq denied the incident.

On April 17, 2007, al-Mutlaq called for Iraq’s insurgent groups to unite against the U.S. during an interview with Reuters from Amman. He said that insurgents must agree on a future vision of Iraq if the U.S. military did not abruptly pull out of the country.

His rapport with the wider Sunni population is questionable, though. A declassified December 2007 intelligence assessment by the British government’s Joint Intelligence Committee described al-Mutlaq as commanding “little support from the Sunni street.”

But the key point is that Sam Patten didn’t seem particularly concerned by the fact that the U.S. administration he once served suspected al-Mutlaq of siding with the insurgency.

Lobbying for the dynasty

Patten’s loyalties are further revealed from documents he filed in accordance with lobbying regulations.

Congressional filings for the Committee to Destroy ISIS reveal that Patten’s Iraqi benefactors go far beyond al-Mutlaq and the al-Arabiya Coalition, to one of Iraq’s most powerful and wealthiest Sunni clans. The dynasty once maintained friendly relations with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, but went on to forge close relations with the U.S. military occupation run by the Bush administration.

The first filing, filed and signed by Patten in August 2016, reveals that the Committee is majority-owned by a foreign entity listed in the disclosure form as “Rhodes Precast Concrete Ltd.” The documents show that Patten is essentially acting as a lobbyist for this “foreign entity.”

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