We can only thank our lucky stars that an eagle-eyed security manager and half the reporters in Washington were on hand to warn us.
I have already written in support of Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense. I think Pete could be a positive disruptive force at a Pentagon that is in bad need of a shock to its system. As an unconventional pick made by an unconventional president, I knew he was bound to come under fire.
I did not know the fire would this . . . stupid.
Behold the Associated Press. Trump Pentagon pick had been flagged by fellow service member as possible ‘insider threat’:
Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member due to a tattoo he has that’s associated with white supremacist groups.
Hegseth, who has downplayed the role of military members and veterans in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and railed against the Pentagon’s subsequent efforts to address extremism in the ranks, has said he was pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. He’s said he was unfairly identified as an extremist due to a cross tattoo on his chest.
Put aside the email’s jumbled word salad, as Jerry Dunleavy calls it. It is more important to understand the utterly bizarre moment in time in which this email was sent.
Reporting suggested that as many as 80 of the 700 January 6th rioters were veterans or had a military affiliation. A narrative formed, ignited in the press, that the U.S. military was rife with ultraconservative separatists and violent anti-government revolutionaries.
Reaction by the incoming administration can be best described as a moral panic. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin directed a one-day “stand-down” of 2 million uniformed service members to educate and address extremist behaviors in the military ranks. He stood up a Pentagon Counter-extremism Working Group (CEWG), led by the Biden Pentagon’s chief diversity, equity, and inclusion adviser, that obligated senior members of the Joint Staff, individual services, and the office of secretary of defense to meet weekly to discuss the insider threat from said extremists. Before the CEWG convened its first meeting, Austin announced a large commitment of Pentagon time and resources to address the “threat of extremism across DoD.”
In the ensuing months, the Department of Defense — faced with unprecedented Chinese military air and sea activity, the collapse of Kabul, and a Russian army beginning to mobilize along Ukraine’s borders — spent over 5 million man-hours and tens of millions of dollars pursuing the insider threat.
The CEWG posted its findings that December. Fewer than 100 extremists were identified among the 2.1 million Americans in uniform, representing less than 0.005 percent of the military. As a Senate staffer, I had some authority to ask questions of the Pentagon. One such question was how many of the 100 extremists were nationalists and how many were gang members or gang-affiliated. The Pentagon definition for extremist was, at the time, quite broad. The Biden administration refused to present a breakdown.
After the report was released, a frustrated group of Senate Armed Services Committee members sent a joint letter to Secretary Austin. “For every documented case of extremism in the military, our military spent a whopping 58,000 hours in training on extremism,” the senators wrote. “While any case of extremist behavior is wrong and harmful to military readiness, previous defense authorization bills have already given our military the appropriate tools to address these concerns.”
In short, this single soldier’s opinion of Christian iconography was written in a very stupid moment, defined by stupid finger-pointing, and a flurry of even stupider accusations.
Hegseth was a prominent political commentator on cable news at the time and had spent much of the past decade of his life in the public eye. It is difficult to understand how purportedly serious human beings with purportedly functioning frontal cortexes telegraphed their genuine anxiety that the co-host of Fox & Friends was poised to violently upstage a presidential inauguration.
No matter how silly the times, if I sent an email to my squadron chain of command, flagged importance high, sharing my profound suspicions that Regis & Kelly were readying a military coup in Guadalajara, I would’ve been shipped off to flight medicine for examination.
Because doing so would also be of epic stupidity, I will refrain from going into painstaking detail on why people who believe in Christianity and Western civilization, particularly those who take up arms to defend it, are known to inscribe biblical verses and crosses on their persons. Hegseth has several. It is unclear how many of these inscriptions, which Hegseth has displayed publicly for years, convey his secret desire to “return to medieval Catholicism.”
We can only thank our lucky stars that an eagle-eyed security manager and half the reporters in Washington were on hand to warn us.