Donald Trump has appointed Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense – and he’s one of the worst choices yet.
“Pete is tough, smart and a true advocate of America First,” Trump said in a speech statement Wednesday evening. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice: Our military will be great again, and America will never back down.”
Although Hegseth is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has significantly less experience than the traditional choice to lead the Defense Department. Hegseth once called the very same Iraq war in which Trump and JD Vance spent weeks pretending to criticize “an example of what we got right, when we got it right.”
He will now lead the Pentagon and command 1.3 million active-duty troops. Or perhaps less so: just last week, Hegseth said“I’m just saying honestly: we shouldn’t have women in combat roles.”
“It hasn’t made us more effective. It hasn’t made us deadlier. Made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t need to encourage that in places where traditionally – not traditionally, historically – men in those positions have been more capable.”
Hegseth has repeatedly spread fear about the spread of Islam in the United States, both as a contributor to Fox News and in his 2020 book American Crusade.
“Like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American crusaders today will have to muster the same courage against the Islamists,” Hegseth says. wrote in his book.
“Islamists – and even mainstream Muslims – are using aggressive tactics to exploit American ‘tolerance’ as utter weakness to achieve accommodations that would otherwise never be tolerated,” he said. wrote. “I’m not talking about on the battlefield, I’m talking about in our classrooms, city councils and social media.”
Hegseth has also complained about Muslim birth rates in states like Michigan, which has the nation’s largest Arab population. He pushed fears the “integration” of Muslims into American society and has done so regretted France’s changing ‘demography’ in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, which he likened to an invasion.
“Next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, lived with, or understood; it must be exposed, marginalized and crushed,” he wrote in American Crusade.
It is not surprising that Hegseth is a strong supporter of the “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer.
Although he graduated from Princeton University, Hegseth has criticized elite universities. “I have a new rule: the more elite the university and more advanced graduates are, the dumber they are,” says Hegseth said on an episode of Fox News’ The Five. “If you went to an Ivy League, prove that you have common sense at all.”
Hegseth does claimed that he returned his diploma from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Maybe he’s right. In 2019 Hegseth, laughed on the air about not washing his hands for a decade, saying, “Germs don’t really exist. I can’t see them, so they’re not real.”
