Pirate's Cove

Has Politico considered that their overt, unhinged support of Democrats and demonization of everything Republican was a hindrance to Kamala winning? That US citizens see through their bullshit?

Pete Hegseth’s Crusade to Turn the Military into a Christian Weapon

Shortly before Donald Trump nominated him to be Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth ventured to the podcast studio of Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL now serving as the Joe Rogan of conservative military media.

Early in the interview, Hegseth reads aloud the dramatic tagline on the back cover of his new book, The War on Warriors: “I joined the Army to fight extremists in 2001. Twenty years later, that same Army labeled me one.” Later, Hegseth flashes his right pectoral muscle, and the tattoo that, he says, led to the label: a large, inky Jerusalem cross associated with the Christian right.

The backstory to Hegseth’s bitter complaint is this: Just after Jan. 6, 2021, when scores of active-duty troops and veterans participated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, a fellow member of the Army National Guard flagged Hegseth’s tattoos as evidence he was a potential “insider threat.” Along with the Jersualem cross, Hegseth also has a tattoo that reads “Deus Vult” or “God wills it” — a motto from the Crusades that has been adopted by white supremacists and was seen at the deadly march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

“My orders were revoked to guard the Biden inauguration,” Hegseth says.

In other words, the Biden-Harris regime with Lloyd Austin violated his 1st Amendment right on religion.

If he is confirmed by the Senate to lead the largest and most powerful bureaucracy in the U.S. government — a big if given mounting allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness and financial mismanagement — Hegseth will be well positioned to fight back against the leadership class that spurned him. He will also likely bring his aggressive combination of conservatism and Christian ideology — the one vividly displayed in the tattoos — into the role. Based on numerous public statements and writings, it’s likely he will aim to undermine the military’s long-standing nonpartisan pluralism by scrubbing diversity from the ranks, banning women in combat, urging the military to choose sides in a “civil war” against “domestic enemies” on the left, and orienting the military’s mission around his fixation on the Muslim world, which he feels represents an existential threat to Western civilization.

Well, that sounds a lot better than Austin’s vision, which is letting people with mental illness, ie, transgenders, into the military, people with higher rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide around military grade weapons, giving them drugs and surgeries (meaning they are not capable of performing their duties), sticking them in barracks with real women. Allowing extreme gays to prance around bases and ships while shooting videos. Making our military soft, and destroying retention and recruitment numbers for those who are patriotic and actually want to fight.

His desire to gut the Pentagon’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and censor critical race theory stem, in part, from his belief that these are their own ideologies, a “religion,” he’s written, for “woke zealots” that threatens to divide the military rather than unite it. He has invoked the need for “a 360-degree holy war” to exorcise “the leftist specter dominating education, religion and culture.” He has also repeatedly suggested that a shared dogma is the key to dominance, including on Fox News, when he tied America’s forfeiture of Afghanistan to the enemy’s enduring religious beliefs. “The fanaticism,” he said, “was an advantage for them we barely even accounted for.”

If Politico is thinking that Hegseth’s view is the wrong one vs Austin’s, perhaps they should get the hell out of their ivory Elitist Progressive bubble and talk to actual Americans. Seriously, this article keeps going on and on and on about Christianity and Hegseth, trying to paint him as a religious zealot rather than who he is, a good Christian, in a way that they would never do to someone who is truly a religious zealot, such as Ilhan Omar.