I'm shocked how easy it is to get a rock onto i mean i'm jamie you're very experienced killing like we've we've established that on the show start this shit again okay listen i can't afford this anymore this is

This has followed me.

I just got back from my book tour and these accusations have followed me around the country.

That's right.

I've been heckled.

I've been insufferable.

Yeah,

for those deaths.

And fuck, what was the town I made up you killing people in?

Oh, my God.

I can't forget.

I can't forget because it's yelled at me all the time.

Unbelievable.

There's so many people who, like, I've signed a book and then they've leaned in conspiratorily and said, I'm okay with what you did in Grand Rapids.

Good.

You know,

they're sickos.

We're manufacturing consent so that when you do have to kill somebody, everyone's like, it's fine for Jamie to do that.

This is a psychological experiment.

I'm giving you a get it out of jail free card here.

Look,

now I feel like I shouldn't even say it.

But how easy is this?

We're going to take the jewelry pool.

It's going to be like a fucking Luigi situation.

She must have had a reason.

Look, in his defense, I mean,

the Luigi defense is, Your Honor.

Will we put this hottie behind bars?

I think.

Come on.

He's too, he's just simply too.

Are you not foaming?

Come on.

I just, I've been bringing, I've gotten a rock, like a rock that could probably do some damage through like airport security all the time it's really yeah because they rocks don't set off the metal detectors i don't think there's specifically a rule against taking a rock on a plane because like there's gym girls you know it's true i think it's probably fine to take a big rock on a plane you know i can i can confirm you will not have a problem with the rock you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna use the company money to book like 20 different flights in the course of like two weeks and just repeatedly take flights with large start with a small rock and just go up by like a half inch diameter each time and see at what point they're like, you can't take that on a plane.

I bet my guess is there'll be a point where they'll be, they'll ask, and then there's going to be a point where they say, we cut off.

And then you should, and then you should just be like, where's the rule?

Yeah, where's the rule?

It's like Airbud.

What's the rule that says a dog can't play basketball?

What's the rule that I can't have a rock on a plane?

It's a souvenir.

You can't prove it.

It's not.

It's a souvenir rock from wherever I found it.

uh so jamie this has all been fun you know what's not going to be fun with the rest of the episode returning to pete hegseth's fascist manifesto i cannot believe i've thought for sure we were you were finishing the book but it was just starting no no there's so many there's a almost a normal book's number of words in this book or roughly a normal book's number of words in this book shocking i feel like they're they're like really you know pamphlety i mean you know actually i happen to agree you know some of the some of the the the quotes on the back of the book one of them stated,

this is Pete Hegseth's Raw Dog, which, since it came out a couple of years before your book, was a weird statement to make.

But, you know, it is true that publishers who commune regularly with the sacred spirits of the Oracle of Delphi have been awaiting your book for generations.

Look, I realized that it was fulfilling a prophecy of sorts.

Yeah, there are references to Raw Dog in, oh, fuck.

It was going to be a great joke.

I forgot the name of the oldest story ever.

Fuck with the fucking monster and the guy with the sword.

God damn it.

What's the oldest book in the world?

Yeah, like the oldest, like, proper

not novel.

You're talking about the Epic of Gilgamesh?

The Epic of Gilgamesh.

God damn it.

What a fool.

Jesus Christ.

I fucking fucked that up so bad.

No,

what were you going to say, Robert, about the Epic of Gilgamesh?

I was going to say there were references to Rodog in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but I forgot the name of the epic of gilgamesh and i just ruined the whole bit it's fucked i it's okay i i i fact-checked it for you thank you thank you sophie jesus christ oh god technically it was a poem but you know yeah it's a poem whatever

it counts it counts it counts just like pete hegseth's raw dog hegseth's raw dog yeah like american crusade i i love a good name competition it would be it would be great if there was a right-wing book that couldn't use the title raw dog i was just thinking how funny it would be if you get made Secretary of Defense next and journalists at New York Magazine are quoting from Rawdog to try to determine how you'll run the military.

A bunch of woke bullshit.

We really don't know where she's going to go, actually.

This is anybody's game.

Impossible to predict your policy on Iran based on this hot dog book.

Look, there's a, I think some of my policies are in there.

My international policy remains absolutely inscrutable.

I know.

And you do spend, there is that weird chunk in the middle of Raw Dog where you spend 40 pages arguing in favor of the littoral defense ships that the U.S.

Navy was building for a while.

I think that

when you read it, it sounds out of context, but when you read it, it actually makes quite a lot of sense why it's there.

They are the hot dogs of the sea.

A lot of sailors say so.

That's exactly it.

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so we're now seven minutes in pete's next chapter is called 2020 death divorce or dawn which i do love like for a man who's been divorced this many times death divorce or dawn right that's him talking about the different paths the country could go down we can either die uh we can have a national divorce or we can have a new dawn right

um so it opens with him talking about how much he regrets that he was a never Trumper at one point, or he was almost a never-Trumper.

Right.

And this is a necessary mea culpa from a guy who was on record as when Trump first started running, he was backing Marco Rubio, right?

And Hegseth was a more mainstream Republican in this period, although he is still very, he's always been very far right.

He just didn't think Trump could win.

And also, Trump was like a weird New York real estate guy, right?

He didn't seem like a real conservative because he's not.

Right.

He's a politician.

He has to hedge his bets.

Yeah.

He's just a dick and a fascist.

Anyway,

his journey is one we've seen seen a lot of Trump's inner circle go on, right?

The reason why they've been able to go from this guy should never be, could absolutely never be president, it'd be a disaster, to,

you know what, maybe he's the savior of the people, right?

The reason that they went through that is because the only thing any of these people, Pete included, believe is that like, I should be close to power, right?

And

yeah, so you just kind of have to,

if you're in Pete's position where you have some documentation as being on the other side of things, you have to like explain how you turned around to licking the boot, right?

So here's what he gives as his first conversion moment.

My first conversion moment was watching a televised Trump rally in April 2016 in Southern California.

The protests on the street were so fierce that Trump and his staff had to leave their cars, walk along a highway to be escorted into a back entrance of the venue.

Helicopters followed his every move, and leftists were delighted.

What was he talking about that was so controversial?

America?

Make America great again?

Build the wall?

America first?

Outside the arena, the left-wing protesters seethed with rage.

Many of them waved Mexican flags and confronted police.

Now, there's no reason to believe that this actually had an impact on Pete.

Pete, the reason he brings this up is it fits an established right-wing narrative, right?

I like Pete.

Pete, yeah.

I like that better.

It fits the narrative that, like, we're only fascist because of the radical left, right?

That's what made us be fascist, right?

And obviously, Pete's documented history shows this.

This is a guy who always wanted politics and always had really regressive right-wing views that he largely used to attack people he thought were less than him.

I like very, I just, just, I mean, where do you, in Southern California, do you think he was when you saw, when he saw this?

Do you think he's like Disneyland?

Yeah.

He's at Knottsbury Farm.

He's getting hammered at Knottsbury Farm, probably.

Yeah.

He's got a puke on a roller coaster.

He's in the fast pass line for Great Thunder Mountain.

He's like, you know what?

I mean, I'm going to give Donald Trump.

So one thing I do believe is when Pete asserts that Trump taught him how to wage political combat, which is accurate from what we can see, right?

Because this is a guy who failed to get a start in politics because he didn't really understand what Trump did, right?

And Trump proved, you don't have to pretend to be respectable.

You don't have to pretend to be nice.

You can be, you can lie and cry havoc and people who are just as shitty as you will hate whoever you're yelling at because their lives are only filled if they have hate, right?

Like that, that's what Trump understood.

And that's what Pete learns from him.

And I do think he's being accurate here when he says that Trump taught me how to fight in the political sense, because there's absolutely no evidence he knew how to do it previously.

I find it interesting that Trump credits him for giving him a Trump spine.

And he writes that Trump taught him how to, quote, live the lyrics of my favorite rock band.

I feel safe inside the violence, right?

Of the political arena, right?

That's that's a quote.

And now, I bet you're wondering what song is that from, right?

I'm scared to know.

It's from the Ever Clear song Santa Ana Wind, which is very much a Southern California tune about being the kind of person Pete hates.

Yeah.

His favorite band is Everclear.

Everclear, right?

Which is fascinating.

Particularly weird because the lead singer of Everclear, Art Alexakis, describes himself as a left-wing Christian who despises conservative Christianity and wrote a song called Jesus Was a Democrat.

I was like, has he listened to the song?

Has he listened to

Everclear?

Also, Not a Santa Ana Wind is not a song about like fighting, really.

Like, that's not what it's about.

It's, it's about living in Southern California.

It's about the Santa Ana winds.

Really good.

Ugh, a Trump spine.

Just a stack of diet codes.

Again, folks, don't make art.

You know, burn, go, go out there right now and, you know, destroy a bunch of vinyl records, you know?

Annihilate human culture.

I'm on the AI team now.

There's no problem.

Don't disco demolition the people.

I think people should always make art, especially if you're bad at it.

Because if you're bad at it, keep at it.

Keep it.

You're going to say that, Jamie,

until we get the fascist leader who's like holding up raw dog and he's like, this, based on this book, we have to expel all the immigrants.

So many of his, you should know better than anyone.

History's greatest monsters were failed artists.

Just keep making the bad art.

If George Bush had just painted his damn landscapes.

You're right.

I mean, that is my my actual stance: we need a whole government department that provides fake fans to untalented conservatives who want to succeed in Hollywood.

Oh, yeah, man, everyone loves your TV show.

They can't get enough of it.

Don't try going out to any of the regular conventions.

Go to this one that we're putting on.

Your fans will all be there.

I would be a crisis actor in that department.

It's mission critical.

Yeah.

Honestly, just some soft reinforcement.

Yeah, just like an elite military corps who show up at the stand-up nights that these guys put on and are like, they have like a Navy SEAL hell week boot camp for how to pretend to laugh at them.

Although, when you put it like that, they are kind of doing that.

Yes, no, this would be protecting the nation much more than any military action in my lifetime has.

Yeah, like we have, we have to keep selling out a ring.

We salute those men and women.

As long as they promise to never run for office.

Oh my God, you had to listen to Michael Knowles' stand-up?

Like,

my country tis of me.

Our bravest soldiers.

Yeah.

So it's actually like this whole chapter is like, I mean, it's so diabolical where he's acting like a rom-com character who's like, I could really be my full self now.

I can just be awful.

I could be like this song I clearly don't understand because Trump taught me how to be racist and not feel bad about it.

Now, the next few pages of Pete's book are accounting of Trump's rise to be leader of the Republican Party.

And again, this isn't really worth going over.

We all know what happened.

What is interesting is the account that Pete gives in this of his own first attempt at getting into politics, his 2012 Senate run in Minnesota,

which is not what it's called.

Minnesota.

Yeah, Minnesota.

During the Senate run, he attempted to defeat Amy Klobuchar.

I say attempted because he failed.

He blames his loss, and he does not succeed in getting the Republican nomination, right?

He loses the primary.

He doesn't even get to go up against Amy.

He doesn't even get to get Kloba

charted.

I don't know.

Jesus.

That one did.

That one.

Look, they can't all be winners.

They can't all be a winner.

Kloba shocked.

Yeah, that's better.

We got that.

That's better.

So he blames his loss on the Star Tribune, which he calls Minnesota's communist paper of record.

Weirdly, and here's what's weird.

So I look into him.

I'm like, oh, so they must have said, don't vote for Pete Hegseth, right?

It's the opposite.

They described Pete as a picture-perfect outsider who seemed like he had a really good chance at winning the GOP candidacy candidacy.

Because, like, oh, he's a veteran, right?

Maybe he could probably win, you know?

That's gold electorally.

So miserable when anytime a fascist calls a centrist paper radical, you're like,

wouldn't it?

They liked you.

Wouldn't it?

Yeah.

I was like, you're ultimately serving your project.

Praising the Star Tribune because their analysis was just shitty like, well, he's a veteran, so he'll probably win, right?

Discounting the fact that Pete Hegseff can't do anything, right?

That like he's he's sucked at the last time he ran.

At this point, he's had two different like NGOs that he's been a part of, and he spent all the money on drugs and partying, you know?

That dig is an insurance

veterans.

Yeah.

Veterans could be some of the most fucked up people in the country, you know?

Often in a, in a, you know,

that's who I started doing drugs with was a traumatized veteran.

Actually, he would have been a really good Minnesota Senate member, but, you know, he's too good a person to get involved in the Minnesota Senate.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Can you imagine our buddy Greasy Will in the Senate?

I know.

I would vote for him in a heartbeat.

Oh, man.

I love that.

So,

yeah.

What a hoot.

So he loses.

And again, he's angry at the Star Tribune because they describe him as a really good candidate.

And he's like, well, this is why I lost because no one likes the mainstream media.

And when they said that I, you know, was good, that doomed me, right?

That doomed me to my voter base, base, right?

It's their fault.

They destroyed me by being nice to me.

Nice.

Pete's campaign was doomed from the start because he's bad at this, right?

He's, again, he can't, he can't, Pete, he can't run an engine, he can't run a charitable organization funneling money into right-wing politics because he's too fucking corrupt, right?

He never had what it took to, to build any kind of independent support or power.

He's not very disciplined.

Again, he's hammered half the time here.

It's like, doesn't it?

It sounds like that he's like wasted money that was supposed to go to veterans before, right?

Like, so yeah, well, it was supposed to be used by a veterans organization to support right-wing politics.

They were not helping veterans.

Okay, so money well wasted, ultimately.

They were trying to develop, like, push more support for the surge in Iraq, right?

Um, and then attack Obama.

You know, like, I'm not saying it was, I'm not saying, like, oh, it's a shame he wasted that money.

Same money, yeah, money well wasted, right?

But it's like theoretically, yeah.

Um, so I want to quote from an article, another article article I found in the Star Tribune in the wake of Pete's defeat.

And this is them talking about,

this kind of summarizes what an incoherent mess of candidacy was.

So this is right after he loses the primary.

Although Hegseth had previously said he would not run in a primary if he did not win his party's endorsement, he sent out a cryptic email to supporters Wednesday that raised serious doubts about that pledge.

The email was titled, The Fight Continues, and did not say he planned to support state representative Bills, who decisively won the GOP nod at the state convention on Friday.

Now, this all led to days of speculation that he was going to run against the GOP candidate who had been endorsed by the Ron Paul organization.

And it was the kind of thing where, like, they just wouldn't clarify what that message had meant for days until eventually, like, they were basically cornered and forced to say, like, no, I'm not really going to run.

Like, it was just

a narcissist who could only respond to losing with sad bluster, even though he had been out-organized and out-fundraised and very obviously beaten, right?

Right.

I love a good refuse to give up while obviously needing to give up obviously failing right it's beautiful stuff yeah so in his book years later pete would insist that he was glad now he's glad that he didn't win he i'm glad and he says specifically i'm glad that patriots didn't vote for me then right because they were right i was still a rhino a republican in name only at that point right i didn't really know the way you know i hadn't accepted trump as my lord and savior

were thinking about him that hard it's good that they won because i wasn't i wasn't enough of a fascist yet Cope, cope, cope.

So we conclude this chapter with another rant that the American left is an existential threat to freedom.

Then we have the obligatory call to violence that he swears isn't a call to violence.

If leftists succeed in turning it and it, the United States, into something else, then as strident as it may seem, divorce is imminent.

If they turn into King George III, find me a town square in Lexington or a bridge in Concord to stand on.

I believe millions of Americans, properly prepared and organized, would do the same.

Our great flag means nothing without freedom.

Better to go our separate ways, a new freedom country-loving country and all, than be complicit in the destruction of America.

This is not a call to violence, not at all, and it's not what anybody wants.

It's simply a recognition that freedom-loving Americans will not stand idly by and watch our blessed freedoms be trampled.

Now, among other things, what were people pissed about King George III?

Was it that he was like deporting people without like any kind of trial?

Was that like a big part of the Declaration of Independence that like his troops were just like arresting and sending people away?

No, they were doing

kind of due process.

They were doing a crusade with gun.

They were doing a gun crusade.

And so actually

make a lot of sense.

It's just so fucking embarrassing.

Good for him.

Now, the chapter ends with one final little rant about how 2020 is our last possible chance to prevent the collapse of the United States.

You know, no more shots after this.

The leftists will have taken too much control.

Anyway,

that would be nice.

The Pete Hegseth, who wrote American Crusade in 2020, was no less committed to forcing a far-right Christian theocracy on the rest of the country than the Pete of today, but he was quieter about it.

Not a lot quieter, but there's still even a little bit in 2020, more kind of creep you got to put onto it so that it doesn't sound too bad.

Like the far-right still kind of felt like they had to respect some kinds of properly patriotic diversity, at least in public.

So when it comes to the actual timeline of like, when was Pete radicalized?

When did he arrive at his current beliefs?

And what does he actually believe beyond I should be important?

That's harder for me to say.

Some of the evidence.

There might not be much more.

Yeah.

Some of his evidence from his time in the service paints an image of a man less convinced than his present iteration of like a lot of the fascist stuff.

He's gone on record about his upbringing in a Christian home, but in keeping with the traditional reborn in the spirit evangelical narrative, it's clear he doesn't consider, he will now claim that like young Pete wasn't really a believer, right?

Not the way I am, right?

As a kid, I wasn't really, I didn't, I I wasn't really devote, committed to Christ, you know?

Right.

Well, it sounds like, yeah,

there's a difference between growing up in a religious household and like enacting the, and, and being religious.

I mean, I think it's more because as we'll talk about, the evidence suggests he was very religious and always has been.

It's more if you are talking to an evangelical audience, there is an expectation.

that you will give the, your narrative of like your own personal journey to faith has to be a hero's journey.

So it can't just be, I've always been religious and always been great.

It has to be like, No, I rejected God, I was living this amoral life of the flesh, I used to be a pill popper, LSD tripper, high-rising and low-sliding, popping heads and busting reds, kicking in doors and banging whores, but then I got a man who was hung up for my hang-ups.

You know, it's got to be that kind of thing, right?

It's just that top of the dome, Robert.

No, I stole that from the movie Marjo, which I talk about a lot on this show.

Way too often, you could have lied.

I would have.

Oh, that's terrific.

No, it's beautiful stuff.

It's beautiful stuff.

Really, Really, really good.

Pete Hegseth has claimed in a recent interview with the Nashville Christian family that his parents were Baptist, but quote, my home life was not political, but it was very faith and family-based.

Now, again, this is nonsense.

This is a common sentiment from people who are raised in very right-wing environments that my upbringing wasn't political because conservatism is just common sense.

You know, it's not politics, just common sense.

She's like, Christianity is not a religion, it's just the truth, right?

Which I still think is more commonly accepted

across the board than it should be.

No, and it's one thing I'll give, because I have a lot of issues with my parents and the conservatism I was raised with, but they never said we were a political.

They were like issues with your parents.

We are very political right-wingers, right?

That was always my parents' attitude.

Yeah.

So at least there's that, right?

I just have no respect for this.

So I wasn't political.

Yeah, my parents donated exclusively to Republicans.

And like, I edited a Republican newspaper in college, and we went to church three times a week, but I wasn't really religious, you know?

So Pete first gave his life to Christ as a teenager, but would complain after the fact that his public school was secular, right?

And kind of blamed it like, oh, you know, I gave my life to Christ, but I still wasn't really Christian because of my public school.

Quote, it's fair to say I had a Christian veneer, but a secular core and thought I was ready to go out into the world and profess Christ.

I wasn't.

And the reality is he didn't have any interest in doing that, right?

Neither does he now, but he was interested in getting rich and being successful, right?

Because he's a rich kid and he wanted to content.

He wanted to do the thing that rich kids do, which is get into finance and get richer, right?

Bear stearns, what a pick.

I do, it's so funny because, like, the narrative you're describing that he wants to apply to himself, like, it is kind of available to him where he, you know, like lived a, whether he wants to admit it or not, a very rude.

All the drunkenness and stealing, but yeah, right, but you'd have to be willing to stop doing that in order to have the narrative.

So he's got to make one up.

Yeah.

He's got to make one up.

And you know what else we have to make up?

What?

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You can find Close All Tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

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You know, every time I say say I love you to the listeners, I'm thinking about one specific listener.

And it might be you.

You don't know, you know?

But everyone else, I don't love.

In fact, I hate and I'm actively working to sabotage.

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You're the only thing that I care about, you know?

Every time I hear you speak to your listeners, I'm reminded that

parasocial relationship can also be based in antagonism.

And it's called negging.

It's called negging, Jamie.

Oh, I've read the book.

Yeah, though, that's the Bible of how to be a good podcaster.

Gold leaf.

Did you know there's a gold leafed version of that book?

Why?

Even the author is disavowed it.

I know, I know.

Oh, God.

It's like him and the guy who first came up with the Alpha Wolf concept.

Just like, oh, man, I really,

this thing that made me famous and noteworthy was a real mistake.

This thing that made me millions and millions of dollars.

I fucked up.

And then the humiliating pivot you get, whereas the guy who wrote the game, I think it's Neil Strauss.

He was just like, wait a second, I freaking love my wife.

Yeah, and actually now it's called I freaking happy.

I'm happy.

Yeah.

Like,

it turns out this made me miserable and loving and respecting a woman made me happy.

I'm glad he knows he's wrong, but I'm also like, stop publishing books.

A little faster, man.

Maybe, yeah, maybe don't write any more books.

Maybe you

I feel differently about the wolf guy, right?

He really was just trying to do good wolf research and just a just a fuck up, you know?

It's not his fault.

Like he didn't try to be like, I'm gonna make alpha wolf a thing.

He was just describing wolf behavior and weirdos ran with it.

I guess I'm not as familiar with his trajectory.

He was literally just talking about wolves.

Yeah, he was the concept of the alpha wolf developed from this wolf scientist who was studying wolves in captivity and describing their hierarchy.

That's smut I've read.

Yeah.

And then, and then it turns out that, like, actually in the wild, there's like alpha wolf behavior.

Doesn't we don't see it because like it's not really

evolutionarily beneficial.

It's a thing that happens when wolves are put in an unnatural situation.

Basically, it's a thing that happens in wolf prison, not in the wild, right?

And he has spent the rest of his career being like, no, the alpha wolf thing, like, it's wrong.

It's not a concept in anything.

It's certainly not a concept for humans.

Like, stop talking about alphas, you dicks.

It's a bummer.

Yeah.

Speaking of alphas, Pete Eggseth.

Real, real alpha male.

I'm looking for this book.

The name of this book,

I saw a friend from college like a year ago, and I was like, what have you been up to?

And she's like, I'm getting really into like wolf smut, which was not the answer I was expecting.

No, that's probably just straight up pornography.

Yeah.

But otherwise, she was, she was doing really well.

I mean, this is a part of it, but she, she, like, recommended a book, and I listened to it for a while.

And, you know, if this is your thing, go with God.

But I was like, oh my God.

There's, first of all, there's so much, there's so many of them.

It was one of those like the

bodyguard's wife's accountant type titles.

I'm going to find it.

Keep Heggs that thing.

I'm going to find this.

So, you know, Pete claims, obviously, that like, yeah, he was secular at his core.

He just had a Christian veneer.

I think the reality is that, you know, he's always been pretty religiously far right and politically far right.

But he was, as a young man, just wanted money, right?

Like, that's all he really gave a shit about.

He claims that the first thing that starts to radicalize him towards Christian nationalism is a class he takes at Princeton on Christianity.

Quote, taught by an atheist famous for studying the Gnostic Gospels, the prof believed Jesus died, was buried in a shallow grave, and was eaten by dogs.

I realized I was not prepared to combat such thinking and went to the library to read dusty books that pointed to and explained the veracity of the gospels.

Defending my faith became an academic endeavor because I sensed faith and the Bible were good.

And like, man, eaten by dogs.

Eaten by dogs?

Like, seriously, I get like, obviously, there's a very strong argument to be made that, like, well, the Jesus of the Bible was one, was probably conflating a couple of different actual guys who were like messianic guys who claimed they were the Messiah wandering around the Holy Land in that period, right?

Like, eaten by dogs.

How would you even prove that?

Why would that be an argument that a professor would make?

And he was definitely eaten by dogs.

And why would this be the first we're hearing of it?

That is, speaking of dogs, though, I have got the name of the wolf porn I was oh, thank God.

The audience has been on the edge of their fucking seats for this.

And if this is your thing, I like, I don't want to hear more about it, but I respect it.

Here is the name of the book that I read part of.

The Tyrant Alpha's Rejected Mate, which is one word too many, but it's got 3.8.

That's a long title.

It's got like, we have similar scores on Goodreads.

Okay, the air, followed by The Air Apparents Rejected Mate, followed by The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate.

So, a real rejected mate fetish going on here is what I'm reading.

Yeah, it's all about, well, what it's about is like falling in love with a, with a fuck-ass wolf who kind of is nagging you.

There's a lot, there's a lot

of, that's how I would refer to

the tyrant alpha.

Uh, but you could also easily call the tyrant alpha a fuck-ass wolf.

Sure.

Yeah, that scans.

Uh, so there's no real evidence for any of what he's claiming about his fucking professor here or the fact that, you know, he starts doing serious bible research that proves the historical i don't think he does any research right uh again he's raised to believe this shit and it like funds it fuels his narcissistic sense of superiority he's always fit in here right this is just the explanation he has to give in the book because as i stated evangelicals expect a certain kind of narrative well it's also like yeah it for lack of a better like term he needs to be not like other girls in order for this narrative to work yeah um again his initial goal is to get rich and then the global war on terror gets in the way, and Pete winds up gravitating more towards the military.

He claims, though, that during this time, he spends more than a decade studying Christianity,

which kind of conflates with other things he says, because he's argued in this same interview that his faith didn't become real until 2018.

This is when he claims that he was properly saved and born again, just in time for him to jettison the last of his rhino credentials and hop onto the Trump train.

The fact that those things happened around the same time that he's like, oh, I was saved.

At the same time, I realized Trump was God's pick to save America.

This is not really trustworthy, right?

Although, again, I think the thing he's lying about is he's always been this guy, right?

He covered his body with Christian fascist tattoos, you know, and other fucking we the people shit, you know, like I don't think he's lying about being a Christian nationalist or being a fascist.

I think he's lying about the fact that this was a journey, you know?

Right.

I mean, it's, it's, it seems like he has no issue with any of this at any point in his life, but he needs the narrative.

He needs the narrative.

And I, I would be so curious.

I feel like this happens in all sectors of public life of how many times you're going to keep telling the same story about yourself to keep yourself like relevant and to keep yourself kind of an underdog.

Right.

You always have to be an underdog, even once you've like succeeded, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, that's a big part of my ego, right?

Nobody believed that we could have the largest history podcast on the internet, you know, no, aside from all the people who believed in me and fought for me and advocated for me and guested on the show and whatnot, like nobody, nobody believes in you.

Nobody believes in you, right?

Aside from those people, right?

You were, yeah, you were, you were podcasting from, you know, just like prostate on the floor.

Nothing.

You had nothing.

Exactly.

I was, I was at the lowest a man can be, you know, living in an apartment on the edge of Santa Monica.

So in a way, you also found God in 2018.

I did.

Yeah.

You and Pete have that in common.

My God was, was the pod.

Yeah.

Sophie, if we register as a church, do we get to stop paying taxes?

Oh, yeah.

What's this trick in the book?

Oh, shit.

Okay.

All right.

We're going to look at it and talk about this some more offline.

We'll talk in some more about this offline.

So in like the kind of early chunk of the Trump years, he and his family first moved to New Jersey to attend a community church called Colt's Colt's Neck, led by Pastor Chris Durkin.

I found a year-old YouTube video published by the church in which Pastor Durkin reads out, Five Ways Christian Families Are Under Attack, which proves that Christian media is always about a decade behind because they've only just discovered listicles, right?

This is like 2024.

Now, the video does not have a lot of views, but Durkin is a guy that Hagseth is later going to claim was like a big influence on him.

And so it's kind of worth listening to some of what he says.

In a summary for the video, Durkin writes, more than any time in our lives, it feels like Christian families are under attack.

Are these contemporary attacks random or is there a deeper battle going on beneath the surface?

He spells there wrong, but I'm just being petty here.

Well, no, no, hand his ass to him.

Also, I mean, you do have to hand it to him that he did not change his name from Durkin.

He didn't.

No, no, and he really should have.

He really should have.

That's why he hasn't blown up in the way the next preacher we're going to talk about has.

But should have been Gunner.

I will say the way he talks, his speech is so, the speech is written so similarly to how Hegseth talks.

It's either just evidence of how much this guy influenced Hegseth, or maybe they shared a writer, right?

I don't know.

Not impossible.

It's also probably the case that this is more the result of Christian grievance, conservative grievance culture, just being very predictable, right?

The overarching message is always that you, the good normal people, are under siege from the evil outsiders, you know, the leftists or the enemy within, right?

And since the chief enemy of Christianity is the devil, anyone advocating for a lifestyle different than yours is literally the devil, right?

And that's made very clear in this segment of the Five Ways Christian Families Are Under Attack speech by Pastor Chris Durkin, which Sophie's going to play for you now.

Designed by God as a gift from God, that through marriage, not only is it good because it's not good for man to be alone, that through marriage, not only are we commanded to be fruitful and to multiply, but also in the New Testament, marriage is a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ itself.

Whether you're talking about God's character and plan and creation, or you're even talking about Jesus Christ, his life, his death, his resurrection, his love for his people, his bride, the church, this is going to fill hell with all kinds of fury, and it's going to be aimed at your family.

And right, the argument there he's making is that like, yeah, gay marriage, all of these different like cultures, like, it's literally the devil, right?

Like, anything, anytime you urge anything outside of like what Christians believe about this, like, no, God decreed what marriage is.

So you are literally on the side of Satan, right?

Yeah.

Which is you can't have a secular society with these people.

You can't be free with these people in your country, right?

And this is like his reality.

This is his baseline.

The listical nature really does crack me up.

I do love that it's a listical, yeah.

My college, what do they call it?

The guy who talked at my college did

my commencement speaker, Mr.

Jay Leno, delivered his speech.

Wow, brag.

No, no.

He delivered his speech in the form of a list, and that was 10 years ago.

And it was old boys.

Yeah.

Good stuff.

Okay.

So, yeah,

let's get back to this lovely stuff.

This lovely, lovely esopode.

So,

yeah, the underlying truth that is revealed by reading American Crusade is that people like Pete Hegseth and his fellow evangelical dominionists have no desire to coexist with anyone else.

That's why they have to portray this as an existential battle, because only by pretending their enemies are the same as them can they morally justify the kind of violence that they are going to try to do, right?

What little fun there is in reading American Crusade comes from looking at Hegzeth's predictions for what will happen if the left wins in 2020 and comparing that to what actually happened.

My favorite example of this comes right at the end of chapter two.

If Trump loses in 2020, I fear America is doomed.

The Democrats, on track to nominate a radical leftist, would complete the political domination they already maintain in our culture, media, and schoolhouses.

The ivory towers of the Ivy League would become the policies of Washington, speech codes instead of free speech, bye-bye Second Amendment, anti-Israel and pro-Islamist foreign policy, naked socialism, government-run everything.

Yeah, that's all what happened when radical leftist Joe Biden got elected.

They should have been certainly embraced anti-Israel policies.

I was going to say that what in particular fucking sticks out like a sore thumb.

And just how immediately all of these Ivy League institutions, like most of them, just caved Trump.

Like, you know.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

Incredible.

Well, Pete, unfortunately, you didn't call that one.

And I mean,

certainly is benefiting from that not having happened.

Once again, we desperately wish for a Democratic Party that functions the way Republicans pretend it functions.

Yeah.

Like, oh, how nice that would be.

Radical leftists.

These anti-Israel, radical leftists.

Yeah.

Well, God.

Oops.

So, again, the big takeaway, the actual practical takeaway you should get from reading lines like this is that there was never any hope for the Democratic Party to pull away moderate Republicans or fracture Trump's base, right?

That was never possible, not from Biden, not from Harris, right?

Any Democrat, no matter what they do, no matter how nice they try to be to conservatives, no matter how much they tack to the middle in their politics, will always be attacked as being anti-Israel and a radical leftist, right?

Period.

Tacking to the middle and backing Netanyahu just calved off people who might otherwise have voted Democrat.

You know, it's just a disastrous strategy.

I need to write something about this, but like part of when I knew, when I started to get really worried about Harris's campaign, was when she started like campaigning around with Cheney.

And I could tell, like, okay, she's doing this because she wants to get, she thinks that she can get Republicans like my mom to vote for Harris and my mom was a lifetime Republican loved John McCain loved Dick Cheney loved George W.

Bush hated guns was like was fine with banning guns was not like and so and was very pro-abortion right and so

you you would I guarantee you if you would like bring up the profile of someone like my mom to Kamala Harris right or to Joe Biden oh we can get this voter we can get this voter right right this is someone as long as you know we're not too radically left

we can speak their language and convince them.

And no, you can't.

My mom would have died before voting Democrat, right?

She would have chosen death over voting for the Democratic Party, period.

You know, like there was never any chance of you getting her, right?

And the instant I realized they're, they're betting on that as opposed to trying to get anyone.

you know, any moderates or people further on the left, like on board with actual like policies that will help them was like, okay, we might be in trouble here.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it's

something that just like another example of the right being far more like

organized, for lack of a better term, than the left is, because there are people who didn't vote for Kamala because she would not move left.

Like, I don't know.

It's just the idea that there are good Republicans buried inside the party and we can shake them out of voting visits.

No, no, no.

Even the people who are like good, who have more reasonable stances, who, you know, had issues with trump what they wanted most is to win and as soon as you like like because of and this is the project of 20 something 30 years of right-wing media this was what fox news accomplished what matters most to the majority of republican like like dedicated republican voters and obviously there's a sizable chunk of people who voted republican last election who flip-flopped between and those people are reachable which is why they flip-flop so often when we're talking about the core of the party their primary motivation is hurting democrats is is hurting immigrants, is hurting the groups of people they hate and have been taught to hate

by year at this point, a couple of generations of conservative media.

You know, it's inflicting pain on their enemies.

And so you can't win them over by being like, but look, we adopted one of your policies.

You know, don't you like this now?

Aren't we better than that Trump guy?

No, because that Trump guy is promising to kick somebody and they want to see somebody in pain.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Yeah, I, I, I reflect often on that, like that, the phase of her campaign where there was a series of campaign commercials that were encouraging women, like conservative women to vote for her behind their husbands' backs.

Do you remember that picture?

Yeah.

That was.

I'm like, that's just going to offend people.

Like, it's not going to, you don't, it's just, just bad choices.

Just bad choices.

I do, I do believe that there were probably voters like that, but it's like, that's not the fucking way to feel.

And that's not going to who's going to move.

Exactly.

That's not as

effective as actually moving left.

Again, like, oh, wow, you know, this swing state has a massive number of like Muslim voters.

I wonder if they'll be angry at us completely failing to reign Israel in on a genocide.

Probably not.

They'll vote blue no matter who.

We don't need it.

Of course, it's them who gets blamed.

Cool, cool.

And I'm saying, that's not the only reason Harris lost, right?

That explains like one state.

There's a bunch of reasons, but the whole we're going,

we can get these people, you know?

We can break off a lot of them because they're basically reasonable people doesn't work because they're not.

They're not.

Their brains have been damaged by decades of propaganda and the damage is permanent.

Anyway.

This is the

good vibes.

Good vibes on the

vibes.

Anyway, I will say there's a weird kind of comfort I get from reading Heg Hegseth's book, not because it's less awful or even less homicidal than I'd feared, but because

it's validating.

It's the conservatism I know and it's the conservatism I was raised inside put on full display, right?

And in a way that I think I really would encourage.

I found a free copy of this book online, by the way.

I didn't pay for it.

If you just Google full text free, you can find it too.

I don't know the legal status of this, but it's not hard to find.

I want to get Democrats who think they can reach out to Republicans to read this book, because it really clearly, it really points out like why

it's that attempt is so fundamentally doomed, right?

Like, anyway, there's another mask off moment, a useful one later in the book, when Pete has a chance to lay out the things he had

a useful one.

A useful one, yes.

Okay.

Pete winds up in a passage laying out the things he admires about Islam.

And this is part of he's still, he's making the broader case that it's an existential threat to Americans and freedom.

But he writes this, almost every single Muslim child grows up listening to and learning to read from the Quran.

Contrast this with our secular American schools, in which the Bible is nowhere to be found.

And you'll understand why Muslims' worldview is more coherent than ours.

First off, hmm.

Not entirely inaccurate statement about the Muslim world.

I was about to say, it's like

more about schools in the Muslim world.

Like, yeah, that describes some people, but I don't know.

I guess I've just talked to more school teachers in Iraq than Pete has,

who complained repeatedly that they just didn't have books anymore and hadn't since Saddam left.

I don't think that was Pete's focus in Iraq.

He's not a focus.

He's just talking to school teachers.

Okay, so I mean, it's just more Christian fundamentalism that if we taught the Bible in public schools.

Wow, they're all reading the Bible.

They're all perfectly informed about their religion.

They're constantly thinking about it, as opposed to like, yeah, most Muslims are like most members of any other religion where they're like, yeah, you know, on the holiday or whatever, but like, I got shit to do the rest of the time, you know, maybe I get more serious about it if I get sick or something, but like,

people, yeah, they're people, right?

They got other shit going on.

Pete goes on to argue that the Islamic holy books, and he describes the Islamic holy books as being the Quran and the Hadith, if reordered and read chronologically, show an inexorable passage from peaceful writing towards violence, right?

That if you reorder all of the different, like, the Islamic holy texts, the holy books,

reorder them to read chronologically, you'll see that Islam inherently moves towards violence, right?

Yeah, and if you play the record, you just cut the books up and reorder.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, like there couldn't be anything more conspiratorial.

Like, well, if you put like, okay, sure.

Yeah, he's like, this mirrors Muhammad's own journey, right?

Because Muhammad was like a military leader, right?

And basically the point he's making is that Islam inherently leads to violence if you follow it honestly.

Now, this is interesting for a couple of reasons.

For one, a few chapters earlier when he was talking about his friend Texas Omar, he had made a big point that Omar is a practicing Muslim and also 100% American, which seems like it's not something that really should be possible based on how Hegseth describes Islam here.

But he's also wrong about Islam a whole lot, right?

No kidding.

For one thing, again, he states that the holy books of Islam are the Quran and the Hadith.

The Hadith, like, it's not a

title of a book, right?

It's the name for a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad over a long period of time, right?

And it's not really, it wouldn't be right to call it a holy book of Islam, right?

It's certainly a text, a holy text in Islam, but it's not really a holy book because there are holy books in the faith.

Obviously, there's the Quran, there's also the Taurat, which is the Torah, and the Zabr, which is their book of Psalms.

And the last of the Islamic holy books is the Injil, which is the New Testament, right?

These are all holy books in the Muslim faith, right?

But he forsakes three and just adds one.

Yeah, well, and he just doesn't really understand what the hadiths are, that like it's a collection of sayings.

It's not really a book in the traditional sense.

Right.

Discussing Islamic religious texts in a way that's accurate isn't something he can do because then you have to acknowledge that, like, oh, wait, wait, the Torah is like venerated in Islam, and so is the New Testament, even though they don't believe Jesus was the Messiah.

Well, then that makes the case that Islam is actually much more tolerant towards other faiths than Heg Seth wants to pretend.

And he goes on to note: quote, non-Muslims paid a second-class citizen tax, converted to Islam, or were killed, whichever way they submitted.

And, like, it is, in fact, true that there is a tax that non-Muslims are supposed to pay, like, and paid under the, like, the first Islamic empires, right?

Like, a specific tax for being like not a member of the faith.

But also, what he's leaving out here is that, like, this is a pretty significantly better deal than you would get in Christendom as a a non-Christian.

Like, this is actually kind of like a big mark of the relative tolerance of Islam during the period of time where it was like this expanding empire.

Because once, if non-believers were paying their tax, they enjoyed state protection, right?

They're people of the book.

And in fact, there's commandments against abusing people of the book.

And I'm not going to say it's perfect, right?

And obviously, there's you do, you are not an equal citizen in like these early Muslim empires if you're Jewish or Christian, but you do have rights right and you have a better deal than muslims are going to get in christendom right and often we just talked about how after the crusades stalled crusaders just massacred jewish communities in europe right yeah like you were better off in a lot of cases being a jew in these muslim uh like these areas dominated by these like islamic empires than you would have been like in fucking somewhere in europe right like well yeah yeah you would prefer to always pay our tax in europe yeah right it's better to pay a tax and have some rights than be tortured by the Inquisition, you know?

Yeah.

Not a fair ask.

Yeah.

Again, I'm not trying to whitewash any of these Islamic empires.

They're empires.

They did some pretty terrible things, like all empires do.

I'm just saying, if you've got to choose between being massacred by drunk peasant crusaders in a pogrom or like paying a tax, most people probably say pay the tax.

It's a better deal.

You know?

Again, it's just, I mean, it's so

his like binary thinking.

It's every chapter so far has been like, yeah, well, here's, here's what I agree with, including a guy I am increasingly convinced he made up.

And it's also just like this whole obsession that they all have with like European history, Western history, you know, the great works of philosophy, you know, Plato and Aristotle, these like a lot of great classic European think and Western thinkers, we only have a lot of their writing because it was preserved by Muslim scholars during the period in in which Christians were destroying everything that was pre-Christian.

So, anyway,

again,

not to whitewash any faith, all religions, all organized major religions, especially when they have armies, do nightmarish things.

And you can find plenty of horrible crimes committed

like by the Ottomans, you know, by the Umayyads and the Abbasids, but right, you know, it's just

the truth of the matter is that for its day, like Islam was a much more tolerant faith than Christianity, you know, at that period of time.

So.

Which is interestingly demonstrated through the work and actions of one Pete Hegseth.

Of one Pete, Peter Hegseth, yes.

So right after this paragraph, he tries to do a minor meaculpa and he winds up being both historically wrong and committing heresy.

There's so much inaccurate in this next paragraph.

I don't know how to summarize it.

So I'm just going to read it to you first.

Prior to the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, many of these same things could have been said of the Bible and Christianity.

The God of the Old Testament was violent, vengeful, and very judgmental, but a key distinction makes these two Abrahamic religions very different.

The Quran has no New Testament.

And he goes on to argue that the lack of a New Testament means Islam is centuries away from becoming a civilized faith, right?

That like, well, obviously, first off, there's, again, there's so much wrong here.

First off, he says that like.

Prior to the life and teachings of Jesus, many of these things could have been said of the Bible and Christianity, but there wasn't Christianity before the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.

What do you mean prior?

What do you mean, Christianity prior to that?

Let him cook, let him.

Like, what are you talking about?

Like, because he does, he specifically doesn't write the same things that could have been said of like Judaism, right?

That, like, oh, before the New Testament, you know, like, the God of the Old Testament was violent and judgmental.

And, but no, he says specifically, before the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, this could have been said of Christianity in the Bible, which is like, first off, I mean, that's again, man, you can't even get your own fucking religion right.

And second, again, he says that the Quran has no New Testament.

And as we noted earlier, the New Testament is in fact venerated in Islam.

Right.

And he just ignored it in his list of holy texts because it wasn't convenient.

Again, they don't view Jesus as the Messiah, right?

They don't believe the same things about it.

But like

there is

stuff in there that is in the faith, right?

Yeah.

It's just wrong to say that it's completely absent.

Whether he actually knows this or not, it's just like it's so clear that like this book is just predicated on on how poorly educated

his target audience is.

And it's this very common thing with conservatives that like Islam, whatever is the most radical thing you can find that was ever written by a Muslim, that's what everyone believes and does at all times, as opposed to like, no, I mean, Islam's like Christianity and any other religion where like, well, you can find some awful things and people who are like, and that awful thing is exactly how you should act at all times.

And you can also find some stuff that's not awful and some people who say that like, no, the awful stuff's bullshit.

You know, this is, in is everyone just kind of picking and choosing what to believe because it makes them more comfortable yes that's what everyone does with everything like that's that's how human beings are with politics with whatever right um i mean personally my my holy texts are are are titles like the tyrant alphas rejected mate but it is interesting learning about that is uh that is my religious text as well yeah what about installment number four his curvy no no see i'm actually i consider that like the gnostic gospels.

Like, that's not canon.

After the, the, we, we had our own council of Nicaea, which was held in Atlantic City.

Um,

to be honest, we didn't really get around to deciding what was canon.

We were, we were mostly just partying.

I'm very devout.

I've, I've read his curvy rejected mate 40 times.

Once again, yeah, you, you've memorized it like uh, like, like, like Muslim students are supposed to memorize the Quran.

Yes, exactly.

But, like, yeah, there's, there's lots of bullshit people, like the, the common conservative belief that, like, yeah, you just put pigs, you know, pig fat on the bullets and then they can't go to heaven.

That's not part of Islam.

Like, that's just you being racist.

Like, there's nothing in Islam that says if pig touches you, you don't go to heaven, right?

You're not, you're even, you're allowed to eat pork in Islam if you're starving, right?

Like, none of these, even within the text of the, of the, the faith itself, like all of this, like during Ramadan, you're supposed to fast, but there's specific exemptions for like well if you're in a desperate situation and dying or if you're fighting in a war like if if there's extenuating circumstances you don't have to fast you can eat and drink water because like even even like during the earliest days of the faith mom was like well i don't want this to be a straitjacket right right yeah

um but again you can't there's no actual understanding of like how the faith is living it's just a bunch of like talking points that you can use to demonize these people right yeah yeah which is like his whole, his whole platform depends on.

Yeah.

Now, the wrongest part of that paragraph, and the thing that I really recognized, because my dad used to make this same argument, is the idea that virtue was, human beings couldn't be good before Christianity.

There weren't really good people before the New Testament.

It was impossible.

to truly be ethical, right?

Like my dad would talk a lot about like, well, you know, ancient Greece and Rome were probably like the best societies possible prior to Christianity, right?

Because they were, you know, like it's this idea that like decency was invented by Christians and people just couldn't be good before it.

You could, you could be all right.

That's such a weird, like, you know, scale to be on.

Like, you could be okay.

You could be all right.

You could inch towards goodness, but it wasn't until.

Yeah, it wasn't until Christianity that we really knew how to be good people.

It just wasn't possible.

And again, let's go back to those drunken peasant crusaders who just decided to massacre all the Jews in their neighborhood because they didn't have enough money for a boat to the fucking Middle East, right?

Yeah, really Christ-like behavior.

Yeah, Jesus would have loved that.

He hated his own people.

Yeah.

Hegzeth attacks Islam for being, quote, not just a religion, but also a system of governance.

And I find this really interesting.

And he brings out Sharia law as the usual bugbear here.

But statements like this kind of lack.

the teeth they used to have when you live in 2025 because in the years since publishing american crusade hegseth has become a direct advocate for Christian control of the government and the supremacy of Christian religious law over the lives of Americans, even those who do not practice the faith.

And he's done this.

He's like talking about like Islam's a system of government.

That's wrong.

Christianity also should be our system of government, right?

And he's done all this while complaining about the injustice.

This is a big thing he whines about in later writings that his, because he writes another book about fucking warrior ethos shit that we'll talk about at some point.

But in 2021, he gets like basically,

I'm going to quote from the New York Times here.

He has said that he was barred from participating in the military security detail for President Biden's inauguration in 2021 because of a tattoo on his chest depicting a Jerusalem cross, a religious symbol that was also a symbol used by Crusaders.

Reuters and others reported that his tattoos, including the Deus Volt motto that has been used by white supremacists, prompted a fellow service member to flag Mr.

Hegseth as a potential insider threat.

And first off, good work,

fellow service member, he was.

Probably shouldn't have that guy near fucking Joe Biden with a weapon, right?

But he doesn't get fired, but he claims that, like, well, this is why I had to stop, leave my military careers.

I got sidelined because they called me an extremist for simply being a Christian who has the exact same tattoos as the guys who committed a series of hate crimes in Charlottesville.

Yeah, it's the same

as weird.

They kicked him off of WikiFeet for speaking truth to power.

Like, really, okay.

Yeah.

Now, you know, who will never get kicked off of WikiFeet?

The products and services, Rubo T?

No, no, they are the foundation of WikiFeet.

You know?

Just send them pictures of your feet.

Be nice to them.

They'll love that.

And don't check before you do it.

Yeah.

It should be a nice surprise.

Yeah, yeah, let it be a surprise.

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Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

There was the six-foot cartoon otter who came out from behind a curtain.

It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

Should I be telling this thing all about my love life?

I think we will see a Twitch stream or a president maybe within our lifetimes.

You can find Close All tabs wherever you listen to podcasts.

We're back.

We're all sending feet pics to whoever sponsors the podcast.

They're going to love that.

And also now, thank God,

now that we have Trump in the presidency again, feet picks are legal tender.

You can use them for currency.

You can use them.

They're not bathwater.

Yeah, they count as assets if you're trying to get a mortgage.

Great stuff.

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Anyways, okay, sorry, get to you.

Pete Hegseth.

Yeah.

Hegs Pete Seth, right?

Yeah.

So continuing Pete Hegseth's book, right after

talking about how awful Sharia law is and how Islam is evil because it's a political system as well as a religion, he writes, voting is a weapon, but it's not enough.

We don't want to fight, but like our fellow Christians 1,000 years ago, we must.

Oh,

great.

Again, that's U-G-L-Y.

You ain't got no alibi.

That's literally what he just did.

So after the 2020 election ended with Joe Biden winning, and if you believe feet, or Pete, feet, if you believe Pete, his military career ends shortly thereafter due to anti-Christian persecution.

He moves his family to Tennessee, where they attend the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, which is part of the Communion of Evangelical Churches, which is basically a denomination, right?

It's like an organization for a specific denomination of weird evangelicals.

And this sub-denomination was founded by Idaho-based pastor Doug Wilson.

And if you know anything about Idaho, you know that there's no more sinister series of words in the English language than Idaho-based pastor.

So about a month before I put these episodes together, Politico described Doug Wilson as, quote, the new rights favorite pastor.

He is famous for claiming that the gospels give believers a stark choice, quote, Christ or chaos.

And he argues that up to this point, America has chosen chaos.

Quote, reality is optional.

That's why you have people saying that a girl can be a boy and a boy can be a girl.

Great performance.

Egot.

Thank you.

I know that's how he really sounds.

It's easy to see why Hegseth is drawn to this motherfucker.

American Crusade is a book that advocates for Christian theocracy, and Wilson's entire career for like half a century has been dedicated to, per that politico article, creating, quote, a comprehensive blueprint for a spiritual and political reformation that would transform America into a kind of Christian republic.

And Wilson is the real deal.

He is a serious, lifelong, committed Christian fascist.

Pete is not the real deal.

You know, you could call Majani come lately.

Not that I don't think he's a fascist, but like he is, he primarily cares about himself and his own personal advancement as opposed to the cause, right?

It's not even, it's not even a positive thing, but he does care about his own bottom line more than he cares about the project of fascism.

It sounds like this Idaho pays pastor would really put a lot on the line for fascism.

But even the way that he's writing this book is he's writing to meet the moment of the amount of fascism you can get away with and still be viable at the exact time this book comes out.

That is precisely what he's doing, right?

Which is why he's more milquetoast than Presid Pete in some sections because he just didn't think some of that stuff was acceptable.

Right.

And it's worth noting, again,

Wilson's written a bunch of books laying out a blueprint for how Christians should and must take over the country and dominate violently everyone else.

Pete, his book is not a blueprint, right?

He's advocating for the same things.

He's clearly supportive, even though he says, I'm not saying violence, but we also literally need to go to war, right?

A literal crusade voting isn't enough, but also no violence, right?

You know, Pete's book is not really giving a comprehensive blueprint, right?

Because Pete is not that smart and is not a strategic thinker.

It is your standard wannabe politician book, right?

It's meant to stake out a place for its author in the movement by saying the right shibboleths, but the writing is both lazy and shallow, and it provides no real implementation insight.

It's just

no ideas.

It's just like Islamophobia for chapter after chapter.

It is scattered and somewhat desperate signposting for like, pick me, pick me, like me, like me, right?

Like, that's what he's doing, you know?

Whereas Doug Wilson has spent his whole adult life building an actual power base in Moscow, Idaho, where per politico, quote, Wilson oversees a network of allied institutions that includes Christ Church, a publishing house, a classic Christian grade school, a Christian liberal arts college, and a ministerial training program.

Beyond Moscow, the network of churches that Wilson founded in the late 1990s, called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC, has grown to include over 150 congregations across four continents.

An association of classical Christian schools that Wilson co-founded in 1993 now counts over 500 member schools across the country.

Got okay.

So he's

an effective

building, and again, not just in it for himself and his own person, like in it to build a movement, right?

He's very different from Pete.

I would be shocked if he really likes or respects the guy, but he's also very smart.

He knows how to use a guy like Pete, right?

And he's, he's, you know, the fact that he, before he became the sec deaf, was seeing that this guy had the potential to go somewhere if Trump won again.

Because, like, you know, especially after Trump got out, he really gravitated to the people who were just complete toadies and lickspittles, right?

And heading to the bottom of the body for this exact kind of guy.

Exactly.

And Wilson was smart enough to be like, this guy might go somewhere.

I should start getting in good with him.

Right.

And Wilson,

this guy is so committed.

Even during the period of time in which evangelical, like Christian nationalist figures had to pretend they weren't, he would openly preach his support for a theocracy.

He has refused for years to refer to the Civil War as anything but the war between the states, and has described his personal politics as slightly to the right of Jeb Stewart, a Confederate general.

Great.

Cool.

Awesome yardstick.

Oh, nice stuff.

So while Henseth was, by his own admission, squishy for most of his adult life, Wilson has been a howling committed fascist for decades.

My interpretation of their relationship behind the scenes is that Wilson recognized Hagseth as a useful person who was desperate for a place in the movement, and Wilson was happy to give him that in exchange for having a future Secretary of Defense on his side.

We see the kind of desperation Pete had to be involved with and feel like a part of this movement, despite his belated entrance.

In chapter eight of his stupid book, Secularism, Deporting God from America, which opens with this stunning paragraph.

Wow, what is happening?

After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, one of the most powerful things to happen to our country and to me was the Christian conversion of the rapper Kanye West.

Wait, the conversion of a rapper was a powerful movement in America and my life?

Yes, it was.

At first, like many others, I was skeptical of his authenticity.

Is this a PR stunt?

But when I watched Kanye live and listened to his songs, I was convinced.

He loves Jesus and wants to share him with the world.

Even better, he went all in, not content to live a private life of faith in order to protect his iconic image.

What a shot of adrenaline for the home team.

If Kanye is with us, who can be against us?

Kanye is a changed man, but not a perfect man.

As often happens throughout history and in our country, the imperfect people become the best messengers.

I should note that this was five years before Kanye would release his new hit song, Heil Hitler.

Wow.

Called it.

And he's now going by yay.

Yay, yes.

Yay, no, no, no.

Yay, yay.

He changed it again.

Oh, I missed that update.

Thank you, Sophie.

I have stopped keeping up with him.

That

was funny.

That was a funny reference that it should have been.

Kanye's on our back.

We can't lose.

He'll never lose his mind.

Well, which arguably, like,

he already had.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

No, he very clearly had.

He was in active crisis.

Well, cool.

So we've got Everclear and Kanye West.

Yep.

Everclear and Kanye West.

God, my two heroes, you know?

Wow.

Talk about building a coalition

and putting together a team.

My favorite part of that quote is when he said,

what he's talking about, how like he went all.

He really committed to it.

And you're like,

yes.

You're not.

Broken clock, Pete.

Broken clock.

You're right.

Yeah.

So let's get another example after this of how inconsistent Pete's own account of his own past is.

Heg Seth tries to draw a comparison between Kanye's upbringing, which he describes as rooted in good Christian values, and his own, claiming that faith in Jesus was front and center in his childhood upbringing, which is the opposite of the claim he's made more recently in that Christian magazine.

Now, we can look at the actual things Pete claimed and say, dude, you were always raised to be the guy you are.

At no point did secular society step in to force you to stop being religious.

At no point did you have anything but like complete support for being the kind of right-wing Christian nationalist weirdo that you are from our society.

But it's really like he's he's so committed to this

conception he has of himself.

Yeah.

But the more we talk about it, the more I'm like, you know, what you're describing, it's like technically less compelling, but it makes him seem more competent than he is.

Of like,

I was like born to occupy this role.

I feel like that is an equally compelling narrative that he's just too insecure to even admit.

Right.

Yeah.

Like, I was born to be a far-right, like, fail son that rises to power.

That seems to be true.

Yeah.

I mean, yes, that is like you, you were crafted in a lab to be this exact shithead.

Yes.

Yeah.

And nothing about our society did anything but encourage it.

So in the next segment of the book, he claims to be self-aware of his sinful nature.

And he says this, without knowing, fearing, and recognizing God, I would be like a ship lost at sea, wrecked and sunk.

You get wrecked plenty as it is, buddy.

And trust me, I have almost been sunk more times than I can admit on these pages.

Yeah, you have.

I've only seen 40 short years on this earth, and I've been divorced twice, almost gone bankrupt once, and been deployed with a bunch of toxically masculine dudes thrice.

One tour of which included a war crimes controversy.

Oh my god, he's so controversy.

He's so oppressed, you guys are controversy.

I think, you know, really brave of him to

call the American military toxic masculine.

I think he's making fun of the left here, right?

Like, that's the point of it.

But it's also very funny to be like, yeah, there was a war crimes controversy.

Like, dude, per your own claims to the New Yorker, you complained that you were scared your unit was going to commit war crimes.

Well, 2009 Pete can't come to the phone right now.

He also, he notes in this that there's he, there's too much to write about in terms of his like sins and failings.

He I can't actually go into all that detail, right?

Well, legally, he probably can't.

Legally, he shouldn't, but we can.

Yeah.

Okay.

Jimmy Loftus.

We absolutely can.

And we must.

So let's talk about the allegations against Pete Hegseth, R.E.

sexual assault.

We've already heard about all of his drinking and carousing and spending the money from his different charities in order to party and pursue women and repeated claims in that whistleblower report that he and others sexually harassed women who worked for the orgs that he was at.

Now, that all existed prior to Pete's, you know, getting nominated to be the Secretary of Defense.

But then, once it became clear that he was Trump's pick for sec deaf, a new set of allegations kind of hit the public.

And these went back to 2017,

when Pete Hegseth was at a hotel for like a, I think it was like some sort of a work conference.

It was a Republican women's conference.

And he he would be there wouldn't he yes he did he did uh he met a woman known as you know jane doe for you know legal obvious purposes he met this jane doe at uh the conference and they talked uh other people who were there recall them having a loud argument uh at one point and It's kind of unclear like precisely what happened, but they were both drinking.

They had a loud argument around 1.30 a.m., which prompted an employee to be like, hey you guys need to like quiet down and hegseth responded by cursing at the employee and saying i got freedom of speech um and then the jane

patriot even at his lowest yeah and then per npr dough then intervened telling the employee that they were republicans and apologized for hegseth's behavior right

i'd love i love that that's the shorthand for a drunken argument and we no no no no officer you don't understand we're republicans we're supposed to act this way and because of the lawsuit that comes later, we have this woman's texts from that night.

And some of them, she likes one of them, she says, he wears a ring on his pointer finger.

It creeps me out.

Like these messages, they're pretty.

There's one, I'm just going to read the message chain.

Do you know Pete Hegseth?

She asks.

Name sounds familiar.

Who is he?

He's a Fox contributor.

I guess he does Outnumbered and Fox and Friends.

Anyway, our ladies are freaking drooling over him.

Oh, okay.

He is TDB light, mini TDB.

Oh, you mean the man who tried to have sex with my wife?

Not Not a good first impression for Pete, right?

So they're talking about like, yeah, this guy's a creep.

He's trying to like fuck everybody.

Yeah.

And she says that he creeps him out.

Later in the evening, Doe told investigators that she saw Hegset rubbing women's legs and, quote, giving off a creeper vibe.

She recalls, because she is drinking too.

She recalls that the argument that they had was that she got angry at him for repeatedly touching women at the conference.

And so they have this loud argument.

And Doe remembers Hegseth saying, I'm a nice guy.

I'm a nice guy.

And then quote from NPR, Doe said that the next memory she had was when she was in an unknown room.

This is from the police report.

Doe did not know where she was or how she got to the room.

Hegseth was in the room with her.

So this is, she blacks out, presumably.

I think she had it.

I believe she had a talk screen because she goes to the police, but I don't know.

It may not have been soon enough that would have shown if there was something else in her drink.

But, you know, blacking out is anyway.

She winds up.

Refer to Pete's previous writing on the subject.

And she says, I do recall saying no to him repeatedly, right?

And, you know, she eventually files a sexual assault claim against him, right?

That he sexually assaulted her, right?

He maintains that any physical interaction was consensual.

I wouldn't be surprised if he was blacked out too, given his own, like, I don't know what memory Pete actually has of this.

But ultimately,

the police do not wind up prosecuting this because they say they don't have enough evidence to go on.

And Heg Seth settles out of court with her in a civil suit.

He pays her $50,000 as part of a, and makes her sign a confidentiality agreement.

This is just like per documents obtained by CNN.

Yeah.

This is just fucking vile.

I mean, it's not surprising at all that it didn't move forward.

But the fact that it went far enough enough that she had to submit her text, I mean, were there like

kits done or anything like that?

Like, I, that's, yeah, I don't think like, I think by the time, because she didn't initially want to report it at all.

Um, like, it's the kind it often takes long enough that, like, you don't get as early as you need

for this kind of screens.

Yeah.

I read a really uh interesting book.

I'll just randomly recommend it, but I just finished it last week called The Secret.

I think it's called The Secret History of the Rave Kit.

And it's really good of just like how

much technology there is there that is just not used.

But in any case, that's, I mean, not surprising at all that they didn't move forward with the case, but just the idea of like, well, what does constitute enough, enough evidence, quote unquote?

Like, and I know that varies from state to state, too.

Yeah.

And it does.

And I got to read in terms of, cause, again, Pete makes the statement that like, oh, yeah, I was a bad guy, but like, he's he's basically pretending and like, the bad stuff is I wasn't enough of an outright fascist, right?

Like, yeah, that's like mostly the kind of claim that he's making is that like, yeah, I'm imperfect because like I wasn't as big a piece of shit as I am today.

Um, as a result of that, as a result of Pete being like, you know, I've almost been sunk more times than I can admit on these pages.

I want to read one more quote about some of the sins that Pete leaves out in his Mia Culpa.

Okay.

And this is from the New Yorker's article, Pete Hegseth's Secret History.

Hegseth appeared in October 2017 as a dinner speaker at the California Federation of Republican Women's 40th Biennial Convention in Monterey, California.

His personal life was in tumult.

In 2010, he had married a second time to Samantha Deering, a co-worker at Vets for Freedom.

He admitted in an essay that year that he had fathered a child out of wedlock before marrying her, the Times reported.

Then, in August of 2017, while still married to Deering, he fathered a daughter with another woman, a producer at Fox, Jennifer Raucher, who he eventually married.

In 2019, as he and Deering wrangled their way through a difficult revorce, as the Times first reported, his mother, Penelope Hagseth, sent him an email excoriating him as an abuser of women who belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.

She admonished him, get some help and take an honest look at yourself.

That's his mom.

Oh my, well, that's what I call good business consulting.

That's, oh my God.

I mean, that's his fucking mother.

Like, Jesus.

Anyway,

yeah, I just love it when he's like, oh, you know, I'm imperfect, but God uses imperfect people.

That sounds a lot better than, like, no, I'm a real fucking piece of shit.

Like, I am a gigantic who does not at all live consistently with my stated values.

I violate every rule God set for human beings.

On a weekly basis.

On a constant basis, yes.

It is interesting.

Like, he's presenting, like, even as like a a piece of effective propaganda, this book is a feeling because it's so inconsistent with like, who does he want to be perceived as?

You know, like, it just seems like he'll say, he'll switch the narrative from moment to moment, depending on what is the most effective thing here.

What are you going to like the most?

What makes me look the coolest?

Which varies from chapter to chapter.

Like, in this, he's a wounded bird who had to, like, and then in other ones, he's a born warrior because Donald Trump, like, that slid out of his mouth one, you know right it's just uh

it's awesome it's good

it's the the yeah the the allegations against it's like even in i mean and that's unfortunately is like a pretty standard allegation for a guy like this and of course it just like means nothing not to mention the civilian deaths right i like

well this guy rocks So we're going to wrap up here.

The second to the last chapter, though, I should note is chapter 13 is called The Front Lines, Education in Israel.

And it's 90% of it is about how evil the education system is pete is like you can't send your kids to colleges because you're funding the enemy you you should destroy literally burn your own like graduation certificate or whatever um like and he goes he will later he doesn't do it now he says like oh i'm gonna destroy my diplomas from princeton and harvard right as a protest

which he does he destroys he claims to have mailed sent back his harvard diploma years later as a result of woke but like he doesn't actually do that immediately.

He didn't do that.

No, I don't know that he actually did that at all.

It might just be a lie.

He's a pet.

That story is as real as Omar from Texas as far as I'm concerned.

After complaining that like college is evil,

because the whole theme of this chapter is that like college is evil because of what it makes Americans think about Israel.

So after several pages of branding about colleges, he writes, you might ask, what in the world does the state of Israel have to do with any of this?

I live in the United States.

Why is Israel the front line?

And of course, the answer to that is that Israel is, quote, central to the story of Western civilization, of which America is the greatest manifestation.

Pete advises everyone to watch a bunch of Prager U videos about Israel's history and then goes through a summarizes Israeli history in like a page and neatly leaves out the Palestinians completely, right?

Like there's just nobody there.

It's like that's not a factor in the story at all.

He celebrates the big, beautiful army Israel has and talks about their unmatched unmatched standard of living, something that might surprise people in Gaza, and says that because Israel is such a great place to live, that's why American crusaders have to fight for it as strongly as they fight for the United States.

Pete ends the chapter with these lines.

With the front lines identified, let's put a full-on American crusade into action.

And the last chapter is just titled, Make the Crusade Great Again.

It's not really, it's just a rehash of shit he said previously in the book.

This chapter is not necessary, and it's not really worth getting into.

other than this line near the end.

The American crusade can be won, but not through negotiation.

Stale thinking and bipartisan consensus have betrayed us.

This moment requires a total commitment to victory, which includes co-opting the successful tactics the left has used for years.

We must be smart, tough, proactive, and bold.

Anyway, that's Pete and his stupid book.

I hope everyone had a fun week.

Going out on a chapter on Israel, I guess I didn't expect better, but Jesus fucking.

And then he wrote another book called The War on Warriors.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll talk about that one day.

That's his book about, yeah, how America, like, we don't make people want to be violent enough, right?

Like, we, we shame men for killing and stuff.

And, like, yeah, it's just, it's just, we'll, we'll, we'll get into it one of these days, but no rush, not

today.

Not today.

Fucking hated every second of that.

Yep.

Yeah.

So, I, so an average episode.

There's a normal episode of Behind the Bastards.

Yes.

This was meant to be like an easier week for me, but I still wound up having to do a bunch of research because, God, there's just you can't just not talk about the reality of Pete when you're looking at like what he claims about himself.

No, because I mean, one thing I was, I mean, not necessarily surprised about, but there's so many approaches to this kind of book.

And he approaches, and I wonder how much of it is just legal, but like he says stunningly little about himself while also presenting no ideas.

It's really just racism.

Yeah, it's just racism and, you know, like callo self-interest, right?

He wants to be a big man, an important man.

That's all that really matters.

Look at the cover.

Yeah.

It's like you could kind of like glean the contents of the book by looking at the cover.

It's a book by a deeply insecure man who's about to get an undue amount of power.

Right.

Ah, God, we love it when deeply insecure men get great amounts of power that they absolutely are not prepared to wield.

It's the American tradition.

So go out, take power for yourself, and then get corrupt and, you know, destroy huge swaths of the human race.

You know, that's my challenge to all of you listeners.

Go take power somewhere in the world, become corrupted by it, and, you know, send us further down the slalom to complete collapse.

And all I'll say is, Michigan, don't believe what you've heard.

I'm a good person.

Yeah.

Let her into your corner store.

Hand her an axe.

It's safe.

I'm not saying you could and you would be fine.

Absolutely safe for sure.

I hope to be welcomed in your borders and in due time, but I understand the healing has only just begun.

That's right.

Well,

you got anything to plug?

Yes, I should plug my cool zone media podcast 16th Minute.

We are currently on hiatus, but it is a weekly podcast in which i talk to and reflect on the uh main characters of the internet catch up with them years later and uh talk about uh how how broken the internet has made us

um check that out check out my book raw dog the naked truth about hot dogs and it's in paperback now so it doesn't cost as much money or just get it from the library or honestly steal it it's fine i don't think i'm gonna get any royalties yeah uh and yeah that's what i got Well, I think you are royalty, Jamie.

You're the queen of podcasts.

Wow.

That's way better than what you usually call me, which is a murderer.

So I'll take it.

Well, look, name a queen who wasn't a murderer, Jamie.

That's so true.

It's so true.

Okay, I take it back.

I take it back.

Yeah.

All right, everybody.

Go to hell.

I love you.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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