On the menu today: There are fair objections and concerns to secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth, but a Jerusalem cross tattoo isn’t one of them. Read on.
Not All Symbols with Right Angles Mean the Same Thing, People
If you’re a U.S. senator and you’re not sure whether to vote to confirm Pete Hegseth to be the next secretary of defense, you can and should ask tough questions.
Hegseth is indeed young, and while he served honorably in uniform, he’s never run a large organization, and organizations don’t get any bigger than the Department of Defense, America’s largest employer with 1.3 million active-duty service members, 750,000 civilian personnel, and more than 811,000 National Guard and Reserve service members. The task of streamlining the byzantine and sclerotic bureaucracy and its obscure and disorganized finances — seven consecutive failed audits and counting! — is gargantuan, and there’s not a lot of time for on-the-job training. That task has bedeviled many more-experienced figures who preceded Hegseth.
John Noonan calls Hegseth “disruptive,” and that can indeed be an asset. But as Yuval Levin wisely laid out, cabinet posts are administrative jobs — you need to be able to build things up as well as you can tear things down:
The cases for them tend to fall into arguments like “that place needs a good hard shock” or “only a jerk could clean up that department.” This is fine as a general expression of disgust at the excesses of a terrible bureaucracy, but not as a job description for a senior administrator. An inclination to destroy something is not evidence of an ability to manage it, or reform it, or improve it — quite the contrary.
We do need a functional Pentagon, and a reliable Justice Department, and effective health and welfare programs. And getting from here to there would require some vision of how those ought to work and a capacity to organize that work and give it direction. This would require some demolition, but also a lot of construction and renovation — a lot of mundane everyday administrative leadership.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board — generally supportive of the Trump agenda when it comes to defense and national security — fairly asks why Trump and his team were blindsided by Hegseth’s past settled allegation of sexual assault:
So far President-elect Trump is standing by his choice of Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, despite the disclosure that Mr. Hegseth paid a woman in 2020 to settle an allegation of sexual assault in 2017. Press reports say the accusation took Mr. Trump’s transition team by “surprise,” which might be a lesson about picking unvetted cabinet secretaries on a whim.
Mr. Hegseth denies wrongdoing. But the Senators holding confirmation hearings next year also might inquire about what, if anything, he told Mr. Trump’s transition team regarding the woman’s claim and the legal settlement. Whoever leads the Pentagon needs to have the President’s trust. If Mr. Trump wasn’t informed about this political liability before announcing the nomination, he might reasonably wonder what else Mr. Hegseth hasn’t told him.
That said, it is not reasonable to object to Hegseth’s nomination because of his tattoos. You’ve seen particularly ignorant individuals on social media contending that Hegseth’s Jerusalem cross tattoo is a swastika or an iron cross, because apparently all symbols with right angles look alike to these people.
Yesterday, our Kathryn Lopez revealed she found a Jerusalem cross in her office. (It’s been a while since I’ve peeked in Kathryn’s office, but it would not shock me if a piece of the True Cross was under a pile of papers and books somewhere in there, too.)
I noted the appearance of the Jerusalem cross as part of the costumes in Ridley Scott’s 2005 crusade movie, Kingdom of Heaven — does anyone think that was meant to be a subtle salute to white supremacy?
You know what other terms and symbols have, at various times and various corners of the country, become associated with white supremacy and hate groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League?
“100 percent,” the number twelve, the number 13, the number 14, the number 18, the number 28, the number 38, the number 88, a white fist, boots and laces, the Celtic cross, the initials “EK,” the Moon Man from 1980s McDonalds Commercials, the mathematical “not equal” sign, the word “Orion,” various Norse runes, pit bulls, Thor’s hammer (although it looks different from the Marvel Comics version), a triangle within a triangle, a skull and crossbones, and the triskelion — in one of my novels, my alter ego makes a joke about “the dyslexic Nazi party.” Oh, and of course, the “okay” hand gesture.
Now, all those numbers, symbols, and objects pop up in all kinds of contexts that are entirely separate from white supremacy or white nationalism. You can hate Tom Brady if you want, but the issue is not that his uniform number is “12.” Although I’m wishing I had known this decades ago; I could have blamed my lousy scores on math tests on a refusal to use any white-supremacist numbers.
When the ADL set up its database of symbols, the organization made clear that the symbols often had more than one meaning and not every use of them represented a covert or overt embrace of hateful movements or philosophies:
No one who encounters one of the symbols listed in this database should rush to judgment. All symbols depicted here must be evaluated carefully in the context in which they appear. Few symbols represent just one idea or are used exclusively by one group. For example, the Confederate Flag is a symbol that is frequently used by white supremacists, but which also has been used by people and groups that are not necessarily racist. Similarly, other symbols in this database may be used in certain contexts by people who are not extreme or racist. The descriptions here point out significant non-hateful meanings and contexts but may not be able to relay every possible meaning of a particular symbol.
The ADL gets it; white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and filth of every stripe take commonplace symbols, gestures, and numbers and declare them “theirs.” But this doesn’t make every preceding or following use of those symbols, gestures, and numbers retroactively or subsequently evil. And because the accusation of being a member of a hate group is a serious, career-threatening one, it shouldn’t be tossed around willy-nilly.
And yet, that accusation and its consequences have already affected Hegseth’s life:
Travis Akers, then a naval intelligence officer, told The Washington Post that he looked further and spotted a close-up image Hegseth posted of his bicep months earlier that clearly showed the Latin words “Deus Vult.” Researching the phrase online, Akers found that it was a Christian battle cry from the First Crusade in the Middle Ages: “God wills it.” Though the phrase remains in use among some ordinary Christians, especially Catholics, Akers said his research showed that it had become popular with the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and other extremists groups that participated in the siege at the Capitol.
Akers posted the photos to the app then known as Twitter, calling the tattoos “white supremacist symbols” — an interpretation Hegseth has since forcefully denied. The tweet was forwarded to the D.C. National Guard’s head of physical security, Master Sgt. DeRicko Gaither, who soon warned commanding general William J. Walker that the Latin phrase suggested Hegseth could be an “insider threat.”
As he was about to be deployed, Hegseth — now President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be defense secretary — received a call from his superior officer ordering him to stand down rather than report for duty for the inaugural events, according to an officer later briefed on the events as well as Hegseth’s own accounts in writings and interviews. . . .
Earl G. Matthews, who was then serving as the senior legal affairs officer in the D.C. National Guard, told The Post that he believes ordering Hegseth away from the inauguration was a mistake and an “overreaction” to events in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack.
Matthews, who also served in Trump’s first transition and as a political appointee in his term, said he learned of the Hegseth episode at some point after the inauguration and was troubled it didn’t go through the same review process that the Pentagon had for Guard members coming from out-of-state units.
“Pete Hegseth had been a good soldier,” he said. “This shouldn’t have happened.”
It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. If the Senate doesn’t want to confirm Hegseth, it should do so for a real reason — don’t hide behind the fact that some of his tattoos look scary if your vision is poor and you barely know any history.
ADDENDUM: Hey, everybody, relax! That Bucks County commissioner says her declaration that “precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws any time they want,” was just taken out of context!