Part One: Pete Hegseth's Fascist Book 'American Crusade'

Cool zone media

thanks for thanks for coming in with me on that one, Jamie.

That was really helpful.

I think we really, I think we knocked it out of the park.

Yeah, that wouldn't have worked without you, you know?

Just one person kind of atonally going, ah, nothing.

Yeah.

One of you was great, Jamie.

One of us is great.

And you know what's not great?

Sophie has a dying squirrel on her property.

We're gonna gonna not this is like ruined my entire day it's canon i know it's canon i know it's canon now sophie it's canon do you want to give it a name so it feels worse jamie no i'm sorry i'm sorry how about elizabeth elizabeth the squirrel oh no

elizabeth the terminally ill squirrel

i poor but here's the thing i'm not 100 sure he's dying but he's definitely not moving very much yeah that's usually not a good sign for something like a squirrel elizabeth has a lot of unfinished business this is really sad yeah she didn't get her will prepared.

Robert,

I just need you to come over here and do the humane thing because I'm a wolf.

You mean kill it with a rock?

Allegedly.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else to do with suffering little animals.

But yeah,

when I lived in the middle of nowhere, there would be lots of dead animals or dying animals by the side of the road when I was on my runs.

So I would have to be like...

Usually, if I was doing a long enough run, I'd have to do at least one euthanasia on the way.

Like, oh.

Fucking rabbit with its back legs crushed.

You should probably take care of this.

Okay, yeah, that's an important part of her daily exercise regime.

Take a life.

Yeah, euthanasia.

There it is.

When I was little, I had an outdoor cat, which

we shouldn't have had.

And here's why.

There was one day I was like, something smelled weird in my yard, and I found that my cat had like a massive

corpse pile.

Like he had assembled.

It was from a cat.

He was making his own own bone temple, like in the new 28 Years Later movie.

I didn't understand at the time, but I was like, wow, he just did that because he loved me so much.

Yeah, he loves you so much.

He wanted you to have all of the corpses you need, you know?

And that's not, you know,

how many guys will do that for you, right?

You know,

that's why we have pets.

That's the main problem.

I haven't seen the movie yet.

Is it like, all I've seen is like clickbait about it being like zombies with their cocks out.

Is that actually?

There's a a lot of dicks.

You know, when I heard that, I was like, we're probably going to get one brief glimpse of a huge fucking monster hog.

But no, they really, there's a lot of cock in the new 28 movie.

I appreciate that they didn't undersell it.

Okay.

No.

No, no.

There's, there's a, there's more, more dick than you're expecting.

You know, maybe less dick than I would have preferred, but more than you were expecting for sure.

Okay.

Okay, I will, I will go.

I haven't seen the first two,

but I love coming in at movie three or four.

It's okay.

You're not going to, you know what a zombie movie is.

It's set after a zombie apocalypse in England.

That's all you need to know, right?

There's enough a need for context in our day-to-day work.

I'm like, I'm not trying to learn lore for fun.

No, I'm not.

Other than that, I guess in the 28 movies, the zombies aren't dead.

They're just like people who have like a weird blood-borne illness.

So they're still alive.

So they're people with their cocks out.

Yeah, they're people with their cocks out, but it's okay.

They had a child on set, so all the dicks are fake.

They're photorealistic, but they're fake.

What are they?

No, what is that?

I don't know, but

that's the way movie law works, apparently.

I was reading it because they were like, yeah, because we had the main character is a kid, so there's always a kid on set, so we can't have any real dicks hanging out, but we can't have everyone wearing full-time photorealistic penises that are fake.

I can't see why child stardoms should be illegal.

That is

the weirdest

one I've ever heard.

Look, they're like, no, you can't, you can't actually, that can't have been a traumatizing thing for you.

The dicks weren't real, kid.

The dicks weren't real.

Didn't you kiss that they were fake cock?

Like, it's so funny.

It's just so like an actor trying to like comfort a child actor to be like, No, no, no, it's not real, and then pulling the fake dick off of your body.

Like, how is it?

It's so funny.

How did we get here?

I know I'm distracted by the dying squirrel, but what is happening, people?

We're just talking about movies, Sophie, because we really don't want to talk about the subject of today's episode.

That's awful.

Oh, no.

Okay.

Peter Hegseth.

Okay.

That could have taken a worse turn.

Could have taken a worse turn?

Yeah.

I'd rather talk about zombie dicks than Pete Hegseth.

That's true.

I mean, Pete Hegseth is bad.

I was worried that we were heading teal.

No, no, we've done teal.

We've done.

Yeah, I was like, I was like, is there more?

Am I?

You're good.

You're good.

I'm not at the Peter Teal addendum episode.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, yeah,

let's get into it.

I guess that's the cold open done.

You're welcome for all the dick talk.

This is an iHeart podcast.

iHeart presents the big three playoffs.

This Sunday, the remaining four teams battle to make their championship in the most physical, fierce, and competitive basketball league in the world.

The action starts with the Big Three Monster Energy Celebrity Game.

Then Dwight Howard and his Ellie Ryan take on Montrez Harrell and Dr.

J Chicago Triplets.

The finale will see popular Miami 305 with stars MVP Michael Beasley and Lamb Stevenson take on Nancy Lieberman's Dallas Power, who will make it to the Big Three Championship.

The no-holds bought action starts Sunday at 3 p.m.

Eastern, 12 Pacific, only on CDS.

This Labor Day, gear up, save big, and ride harder with cycle gear.

From August 22nd to September 1st, score up to 60% off motorcycle gear from your favorite brands.

RPM members get 50% off tire mount and balance with any new tire purchase.

Need to hit the road now?

Fast Lane Financing lets you ride now and pay later with 0% interest for three months.

And here's the big one.

August 29th through September 1st only.

Buy any helmet $319 or more and get a free Cardo Spirit Bluetooth.

Supplies are limited.

Don't wait.

Cycle gear.

Get there.

Start here.

Looking to transform your business through better HR and payroll?

Meet Paycor, a paychecks company, the powerhouse solution that empowers leaders to drive results.

From recruiting and development to payroll and analytics, Paycor connects you with the people, data, and expertise you need to succeed.

Their innovative platform helps you make smarter decisions about your most valuable asset, your people.

Ready to become a better leader?

Visit paycorp.com slash leaders to learn more.

That's paycorp.com/slash leaders.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

We're back.

Okay, well, now I'm nice and warm to be made less horny than I've ever been in my entire life.

Right.

A guy giving me war crimes in real time.

What a thrill.

I'm going to give you a mea culpa here.

I had initially planned for this to just be a book episode, reading Pete Hegseth's terrible fascist book, American Crusade, which unfortunately people do need to be aware of because he's the Secretary of Defense now.

But then I wound up needing to give extra context.

And so there is,

my initial thing was like, he's not really interesting enough for two episodes on the motherfucker.

Just as a person, he's not that interesting.

But anyway, I wound up, it's kind of a hybrid book BTB episode.

So, you know, there's research here.

There's also just a lot of chunks of his book that we'll be talking about because they matter.

It's just a little bit of a weird episode, but I did it.

Okay.

When did the book come out?

2020.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

American Crusade was his like election tie-in book.

So one of the funny things that you repeatedly come across is his dire warnings that like, if the Republicans don't win in 2020, the whole country's over.

Which like, yeah,

some of this is like not aged well, but it also, it's also a very like fascist Christian nationalist book that makes it very clear what kind of country Pete Hegseth wants to use his powers to as Secretary of Defense to further, right?

Because, cause that's published like about midway through his, his run on Fox News, right?

Yeah, he starts in 2014, um, but he's just initially kind of a commentator.

We'll talk about all that.

So

Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of Defense, is a, you know, embarrassing, first of all.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And he writes in 2020 a manifesto/slash book called American Crusade, which is one of those both like tie-in, I'm trying to get more into politics.

This is back when he was really fishing in the first Trump admin to be made sec deaf.

And there were still too many adults in the room at that point for him to get made Secretary of Defense.

Because as his backstory that I'm going to give briefly will make clear, this is not a man who's ever been reliable in a position of power.

Right.

I guess it never occurred to me that he could be.

No.

I guess he's held down a job technically.

Not even really.

No, not even really, actually.

Unless you count Fox News as a job, but even that,

not really.

Okay.

So Peter Hegseth was born on June 6th, 1980, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

His dad was a

Minneapolis.

Already, like all fascists, he's aging terribly.

Oh, yeah, no, he looks like shit.

Yes.

Because that's kind of what happens when you drink the way Pete Hegseth drinks.

Yeah, fair enough.

Wow.

I would have guessed he's at least 10 years older.

Yeah.

I was like, is Jamie shocked at the Minneapolis of it all?

The age?

Yeah, no, I mean, he doesn't, it's not, he's not like the most obvious Minneapolis guy, but I'm not shocked to hear that he's from Minneapolis, right?

That, that was not the shock.

It was that he's under 50.

Yeah, he's under 50, much younger than you'd expect.

His dad was a basketball coach for high school,

which, you know, he's got son of a fucking high school coach energy for sure.

Yeah, there's how many crimes could be prevented if your, if daddy didn't bench you.

Daddy didn't bench you.

Well, here's the other thing: what's the only thing that a parent could be that's worse than a high school sports coach?

And it's his mom was an executive business coach.

Even worse.

Somehow, they found a worse kind of coach to be.

What does that even mean?

That's like a made-up thing.

That means that you get paid like a mid-six-figure income for sitting in a room and going, oh, that's a good idea.

That's it, basically.

That is boss whom is girl.

Maybe lays some people off.

I don't know.

Yeah.

It's a consultant.

That's what she does.

I love, yeah, it's like the job where at like at the turn of the century, you'd be like, hey, have you considered firing people and replacing

some more people?

What if we outsourced?

And now they're all saying, what if AI, right?

Like it's, it's just, it's just people who come from good families that have connections, but don't have any skills.

That's the executive business coach community.

Okay.

Barely literate positions.

And the consultant community, right?

So his family, they have money and they have very strong conservative bona fides, right?

Like his mom and dad are both very strong Republicans and politically involved.

Pete graduates from the Forest Lake Area High School in 1999 as valedictorian.

He is good at something at one point in his life.

As an adult, he goes to Princeton where he helps to run and again family money where he helps to run the school's conservative newspaper.

He becomes editor eventually of like the right-wing paper on campus.

As editor, he like publishes a promise that he will defend Western civilization from, quote, the distractions of diversity.

It's so like,

I know that they're everywhere.

I'm aware that they're everywhere, but I'm still so disturbed by like.

Just the idea of a young, like a teenage Republican is such a bizarre image to me.

It's like seeing a twin at age 60.

Yeah.

you don't want to imagine them that young.

Yeah, you don't, you don't want to, but you have to because they're there.

Um, and it, it's what Pete's going to, he's going to try a couple of things in later in life.

Like, he's initially kind of more on the Republican mainstream side of things that gets eaten up by Trump.

So, he has to a big part of this book we're going to read is him like giving his mea culpa of like, oh, you know, I was a rhino, I was lost, and then I realized, you know, Donald Trump really was, you know, our brilliant savior and stuff.

And

one of the points that I think his backstory makes is that he was always pretty extreme conservative.

Like the whole reason why he wouldn't have gotten behind Trump is that he didn't believe Trump was really a conservative until it became clear that Trump was going to win.

But like the weird right-wing stuff, the hatred of diversity, that's been there his whole life.

Like he talks about himself as if he'd been apolitical as a young man, but he never really was.

Well, no, yeah, if he's the editor of the conservative Princeton paper, he sure is.

And yeah, that's just a bad group of people to exist.

Under his guidance, the paper attacked Hallie Berry for accepting an Oscar over her performance in Monster's Ball because it was racist

against white people, I think.

I don't know.

I didn't feel the need to go and read that article.

But yeah,

that's the kind of like conservative paper this is.

It's like, it's time to go to war with Hallie Berry for her Oscar.

Yeah,

I imagine conservative papers like that are just like 90% vaguely racist editorials.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

During his time as editor, Hegseth published another student's commentary, mocking the school's policy that sex with an unconscious partner should count as rape.

An article for The New Yorker cites Judd Legum's newsletter Popular Information when he summarized the article in Hegseth's paper this way.

The commentary claimed that rape required both a failure to consent and duress, which a passed-out woman couldn't experience.

So

great guy, Pete.

Yeah.

Put a pin in that because we'll talk about some sex crimes.

Yeah, no, I mean, he really, he really walks the walk in that regard.

Yeah.

It's always allegedly.

Yeah.

Sure.

It's so like, I don't know.

The fact that you're thinking about doing that so much that you publish

like essentially intent is just like it, it's, it's mind-blowing.

Yeah.

The whole like, yeah, well, they can't be sad if they're unconscious is just like the darkest, evilest way to make that argument.

It's somehow worse than like arguing like, oh no, they they wanted it secretly.

It's just like, oh, because they're unconscious, it doesn't.

What the fuck, man?

How do you write that and not burst into flames?

I mean, yeah.

So I can like tattoo you if you pass out drunk and that's legal, right?

Because you're not aware of it.

Because you're not, right?

That's just like, well, if you, if you're quote unquote asleep, anything that happens, it's like the international waters of consent.

Like, it's fucking crazy.

Insane.

Yeah.

If you, if you try to extend that anywhere else, it just becomes increasing, like, it's, it's just nuts.

Well, yeah.

And of course, like, though, that rule wouldn't apply to him.

No, no, no.

Yeah.

No, if I, if you drew a dick on Pete Hegset's face when he's passed out drunk in a Pentagon closet, you would get in trouble.

He'd drone strike you.

Yeah, drone strike your house.

He would try to.

So Pete is, in short, exactly the kind of right-wing dipshit you'd expect him to be as a kid based on his current trajectory.

He goes on to work in finance.

He works for Bear Stearns.

That's his first job out of college, is fucking Bear Stearns.

Sway.

Great stuff.

And he volunteers for the National Guard because 9-11.

And he winds up, well, he gets into ROTC first when he's in college, but then he joins the National Guard as he's starting his fintech career.

And after a year or so, I think his fintech career is interrupted when he deploys to Iraq.

So he does a tour there, which we will talk about later.

This comes up in the book.

So I'll talk a little, I'll talk more about Hegseth's military career in that portion.

But after doing his tour, he winds up back in New York, where he's just kind of like, then this is not an uncommon thing.

He does seek combat.

A lot of combat vets, when they come back, like the things really get bad for them, you know, not when they're over there, not when they're in the ship, when you wind up like just kind of locking yourself alone in an apartment.

And yeah, he starts drinking very heavily.

Again, not an uncommon story.

He feels aimless and eventually solves this by taking a job.

Initially, he's like volunteering as an assistant director at Vets for Freedom, which is a 501c4 group that he ultimately comes to lead as the paid director of the organization.

It's too bad because while he was in New York, he could have just like gone to see Rent on Broadway.

He could have developed a fatal addiction to heroin, you know?

You know, like he could have seen a lot of people.

Not off at Broadway, you know, just quietly slip away, you know?

Yeah, Pete, just go see Billy Elliott, you know, have a wine spritzer, call it a day.

Yeah, I mean, yours is nicer than mine, but sure.

So this is like a very political 501c4 in like a shitty way.

They spend millions of dollars doing a PR campaign to support the surge in Iraq.

They spend another several million attacking Barack Obama's candidacy.

So this is like a right-wing vets org.

And despite the fact that he winds up running it, he is awful at this job.

It is a disaster for the VFF.

He runs up massive debts.

He like takes them into the red by what?

Well, part of it is, you know, they're carrying out these massive PR campaigns, but part of it is that he treats the organization's bank account allegedly like a personal party fund, right?

Like he's spending it, he's traveling, he's doing a lot of drinking and partying.

A lot of people are, right?

Okay.

There's allegations, and we'll hear more allegations about the next org that he's involved in.

But yeah, this does not go go well.

And he's kind of, his tenure is disastrous for the VFF.

Okay, so this is all in the mid-2000s?

Yeah, the mid-aughts.

2008 is when he got married in like 2004.

And in 2008, his first wife files for divorce after he admits to cheating on her repeatedly.

Once with a journalist he'd introduced to her.

Yeah.

So he gets left a couple of years later or forced out of VFF.

You'll hear both things, either that he left or that he's forced out.

Anyway, he's gone from VFF by like 2011 or so.

So sad.

Yeah.

And he attempts to run for Senate in Minnesota, which we will talk about later.

It doesn't work, right?

He's bad at this.

So since he's failed at everything else, he volunteers for another tour in Afghanistan.

He does another tour in Afghanistan.

He's promoted to major.

He comes back to the U.S.

And in 2012, he forms a pack to help like-minded conservative candidates.

Per the New Yorker, according to a report by American Public Media, a third of the funds in Hegseth's pack were spent on parties for his friends and family, and less than half was spent on candidates.

So he has a lot of things.

It sucks because it was like, like, I'm not against this money being misused for parties.

It's much better than if it's used appropriately, right?

Because it's a shitty organization.

They both are, right?

Yeah.

Like, it should, you know, it should be spent on fancy food and alcohol, but

it's also, it's just extremely funny to me.

Like, yeah, he now has a pattern, and it's either start or get, you know, promoted to leading a charitable organization and then spend its money getting hammered.

Like,

cool as hell.

Yeah.

So is he like, is he so 2012, is this like Tea Party era?

Like, who is, who is he running with?

Who's his craft?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Tea Party, Tea Party has started a couple of years ago at this point.

Right.

Yeah.

Gimale dots.

Yeah.

So this is like, that's all happening at this stage.

And he's, when he loses his candidacy, it's to like the Ron Paul organization backed candidate because he's like, he's still too much an establishment neocon.

You know, he's a Bush conservative at this point, which we used to see as extreme, but oh, how the turns are good.

Now they're just widdle guys, yeah, yeah, now they're just widow guys, yeah.

He's got, look at, I mean, I don't know, I feel like you could, some people not to put him in a box, oh, but let's do it, yeah, fuck it, fuck him.

Something about like guys that have like their, it looks like their hair is just like welded to their head.

You're like, i don't trust their

left on there like whatever product not i mean i know he comes by being a fascist honestly but also you have to imagine some chemicals are seeping into the scalp there with the with what with the hair being welded directly oh yeah no no no no they're getting in that's that's what happened to rudio giuliani right he he had the same hair care routine as pete hegseth and a lot of it leaked out of him you know

and when he lost his goo that's when he started losing all those lawsuits the goo was what was protecting him from the lawsuits yeah the goo is protecting him from being being tricked into being in borat 2, alo in more ways than one.

Yeah, that was load-bearing goo.

Brutal.

Jesus Christ, I forgot that happened.

Fucking Giuliani.

Oh my God.

This bitch will do anything.

We'll need to do an episode on him when it's time for us to like,

when everyone's morale is even lower and we really need, we need a win, like a happy episode.

Yeah, I mean, there's just like no failure.

Like there's, it's fun.

It's fun to do an episode where there's just no shortage of L's to sprinkled between their cries.

It's nothing but L's.

Yeah.

Who was he?

Was he the saddest person we saw at the RNC or was it the

pillow guy?

He was my pillow guy was sadder because Giuliani, at least, like, I had a nice fight with Rudy Giuliani.

And, like, I did enjoy the fact that, like, unlike every other major figure there that you would, like, try to engage, they were too PR-trained and too smart to really want to get into it with some journalist.

But Rudy was immediately like, oh, yeah, let's fucking brawl.

Wait, what did you fight with Rudy about?

About Ukraine.

We We had like, if you published an episode, it could happen here about it.

But, like, yeah, we had like a fucking 10 or 15-minute.

He was just hanging around the radio cube.

Because he wasn't welcome in the real convention.

He wasn't in the movie part.

Yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, and he was bored as hell.

God, they should do a sequel to the James Wood Rudy Giuliani movie.

Oh, God.

I forgot that existed.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

I know.

Back when he was America's mayor.

Fuck me.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a very sincere movie.

Yeah, it's sincerely stupid as shit.

Yeah, called America's Mayor.

No, I mean, that's what we, it might be, but that's what we call Rudy.

Growing up as a conservative.

James Woods would be down for round two.

I like that city that's got a dog for a mayor.

I think, yeah, I don't think mayors should be legal.

Or

I think we should have like, you know, some of those cultures that would like ritualistically kill their leaders.

That's what we should do to mayors.

It should be built into the legal system that we have like a wicker man after every mayor's term expense.

That's Santa University rules.

At the end, Santa University rules.

You get one year tenure of Santa and then you're publicly executed.

Yeah, I think that we, that's, that's, that's how we should, that, that's like when we, we write our new constitution, that's how our elected leaders should work.

Yeah, we're now doing a wicker man for everybody.

Oh, you care?

What are you willing to put on the line?

You were a great alderman.

Unfortunately, your year's up at every level at every level the school board yeah the school the comp troller and like sorry brother look would it be a good system no would it work better than our current system maybe look i i think it's worth a shot perhaps i think it's worth a shot and it would really bring people together for particular individuals speaking of things that bring people together jamie

the products and services that support this podcast i love to gather around a good product or service with my loved ones.

Gather around, be warmed by it, right?

Yeah.

Just like the corpse of a squirrel.

Like the corpse of a squirrel.

God damn it, guys.

Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside, and he's shaking, and he just looks like he's seen a ghost, and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tide, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7.

Zone 7 ain't a place.

It's a way of life.

I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't.

We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes.

Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members.

Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Create mood-changing moments with the Pura Wall Diffuser.

Its sleek design and app control give you long-lasting premium scent without lifting a finger.

For a limited time, subscribe to two fragrances each month for a year and get the Pura Wall set free.

Don't miss it.

Head to Pura.com today and elevate your space this summer.

It's time to head back to school and forward to your future with Carrington College.

For over 55 years, we've helped train the next generation of healthcare professionals.

Apply now to get hands-on training from teachers with real-world experience.

In as few as nine months, you could start making a difference in healthcare.

Classes start soon in Pleasant Hill, San Leandro, and San Jose.

Visit Carrington.edu to see what's next for you.

Visit Carrington.edu/slash SCI for information on program outcomes.

We're back.

Sophie is still not happy.

No,

can you see it from your window?

No,

not from where I am, but

I can't see it.

That's probably for the best.

But I can see it in here.

Elizabeth.

Yeah.

I forgot you named the squirrel.

Yeah, she was a Fulbright scholar, Sophie.

Jesus fuck.

She had a huge future ahead of her.

This is really sad.

It's very tragic.

Yeah.

Speaking of things that are tragic, the fact that Pete Hegseth exists.

The fact that Pete Hegseth ends

up sentence.

in 2014, Hegseth started making appearances on Fox News.

And he was initially, he was like a pinch hitter, right?

He was, he didn't have a show.

He would come and he'd be a talking head on segments, right?

He's a veteran.

He leads a veterans organization.

He's bringing in to talk about this to that.

Right.

He's doing that for a while, off and on.

And, you know, he's, he's, he's got whatever Fox likes, right?

He's, uh, he's, he's enough like of a, okay, this, this guy is what our audience considers like a straight-laced looking military man.

So yeah, we'll throw him in whenever we need somebody.

The helmet hair.

Right.

I feel like everyone at Fox News has the same lukewarm soup they bring to lunch.

Yes.

Lukewarm soup and brown alcohol.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's precisely right.

And for Hag Seth, it's basically all brown liquor.

So he helps to lead.

He also, in this time, he gets hired to lead another veterans organization, CVA or the Concerned Veterans for America.

So here he exhibits the same same kind of incompetence and corruption that had seen him pushed out of the VFF.

He was, in fact,

so bad.

Oh, Jamie, not just parties.

There's so much about how bad he is at this job.

There is an internal whistleblower report that's commissioned about his three-year tenure leading the organization.

I'm going to read a summary from an article in the New Yorker of like what this report reveals.

The detailed seven-page report, which was compiled by multiple former CVA employees and sent to the organization's senior management in February 2015, states that at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club where he had brought his team.

The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time and other members of his management team, sexually pursued the organization's female staffers, who they divided into two groups, the party girls and the not party girls.

In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth's leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth's staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana Strip Club.

In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early morning hours of May 29th, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting, Kill a Muslim.

Oh, cool guy.

Wow.

Yes.

It's shocking he found time for all of that, first of all.

I do.

Most of that's not enjoyable, but it is funny to me how often the words louisiana strip club show up in this article on beat hex set

you can learn so much i mean and and and did he tip that's something i never heard

there's no single way sophie or jamie sorry we are one it's an honor it's an honor we are one thank you we are one it's that's miserable i mean there this is the way that a person acts when they can't live with themselves yeah if nothing else but there i mean there's just so many many levels there because it's like in one way, he's engaging in this very,

I don't know, like this very fraternity, but also sorority behavior.

Like the party girls versus non-party girls sounds like some Regina George shit.

Like that's just bizarre.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's just gross dude stuff, right?

Like we got the party girls that we hire because, you know, you hire them because you want to fuck them, right?

Like that's, that's what's going on in this group.

Right.

You know, that's his management style.

And it's, and it's rich that he thinks he could like, you know, weed out a competent employee from a non-competent one, given the fact that he seems like unable to do a single job that he has.

No, no, no.

Because again, it's all about just getting drunk and partying, right?

And sexually harassing slash assaulting your colleagues and racism.

Right.

So he's a racist molester.

Yeah.

So he gets, he gets allegedly, he gets kicked out in 2016.

There are, we have in the record a bunch of celebratory emails from his former colleagues being like, thank God, that guy's out, right?

Uh, one of these messages includes the claim that he, quote, treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to hook up with women on the road.

Cool guy.

So that's his third job, his third organization that he's been shit canned from for massive corruption, right?

Allegedly.

He's just, he's tearing through these fucking things.

I guess he doesn't get kicked out of the second because he starts it.

Are these mostly like lateral moves?

Is he like moving his way up the ranks in any way, or is his, are these mostly just lateral?

He's moving his way up at Fox.

He's getting more prominent within the conservative sphere because, again, there's never any accountability to these guys.

But like his former colleagues at these veterans organizations, even though they're all a lot conservative, are like, this guy absolutely should never have any job with any responsibility.

He's the worst.

Well, Fox, in 2016, it's all but like required that you have some priors at being a sexist.

You have the literal devil in your blood.

Yes.

Yeah.

In 2017, during a Flag Day event hosted by Fox, Heg Seth threw an axe and accidentally hit and injured a U.S.

Military Academy drummer, causing serious injuries.

There's a lawsuit over this.

He claims long-term damage.

Sorry, why was he throwing an axe?

There's like axe throwing going on.

You know, it's like

the

kind of hobby thing.

And he's just shit at it because he sucks at everything.

And he hits this drummer, boy.

If you give an addict an axe, you know.

So funny.

It's so funny.

God, did the drummer at least get a book deal?

No, no.

I think there's a settlement probably, but no, he doesn't get shit.

Because again, we don't,

as Americans, look, you celebrate the person who throws axes, not the person who's dumb enough to get hit by an axe because they happen to be doing their job and don't expect that the future Secretary of Defense will hurl an axe at them.

Wow.

Victim blaming our nation's great percussionists.

How could you?

Yeah, I'm always, look, you know, this is the only time I'll be on Hexeth's Hexeth's side, but if the other thing is a band kid,

I gotta.

Jealous.

Jealous.

Anti-band kid ass.

I pull up my oboe case, start shaking it.

Yeah, of course it was an oboe.

Hey, okay.

Okay, okay.

First of all,

first of all,

no, he's Sophie.

Unfortunately, he's right.

I need to take that.

I need to take that.

I'm on your side.

No, you're right.

You're right.

I have to, obos are a big

bisexual indicator historically.

It's just true.

Historically, that's just, that's history.

Oboe players sound off in the chat.

There we go.

There we go.

The oboe nation is going to fucking sound off.

It's literally, I think it's like playing the oboe and like getting really into a series of unfortunate events or major millennial

bisexual indicators.

Who can say why?

Who can say why?

I was just saying that because those were your only hobbies.

Some Jamie.

Dozens of us.

Yeah, there's going to be a whole thread in the subreddit with like 900 replies about this.

Yeah, they're unionizing as we speak.

Everybody who felt weird reading the series of unfortunate event novels and yeah, played an oboe or some kind of read instrument.

So many crush options.

Wow.

So his career at Fox goes a lot better than his career leading these organizations.

He becomes an official co-host in January of 2017, just as Trump begins his term.

And he is able to get this job because he starts having sex with initially, I think it's uh, I'm not sure.

No, he would have been divorced by now.

Anyway, he winds up, winds up marrying the Fox producer, Jennifer Rocher, um, who keeps putting him on the air.

Um, and I think she's his third wife, maybe a second.

He has three, he's been divorced like three times.

Um,

so great guy, anyway,

he hooks up with this Fox producer who keeps putting him on the air.

uh and he so he bounces around a few different shows he's on regularly and he kind of makes a point of just taking whatever is the most radical take that will earn him trump's attention it's just kind of like i'm gonna be a shameless bootlicker on fox because he watches fox habitually and so i want him to see me repeatedly being nice to him right um

And he's doing this to campaign to become the Secretary of Defense, which he can't manage during Trump's first term because Trump is still listening to a couple of adults a little too much who are like, I don't know, the guy who can't even run a fucking

like NGO without spending all of the money on hookers and blow probably shouldn't be running the army.

We have a lot more money.

There's a lot better.

Sir, there's far better sex criminals to run that department.

We can find you, sex criminal.

Don't worry, you know.

We're aware of what needs to happen.

Right.

Yeah.

So as part of his ongoing attempt to both identify himself with the ascendant Christian nationalist movement and to force Trump to take note of him.

In 2020, he publishes the book American Crusade, right?

Okay.

Which is what, you know, kind of the core of our episodes this week are going to be about.

So let's get into that wonderful book, American Crusade, a nice innocuous title.

So I suppose, first off, it's not surprising that this book starts off with a dedication to his family and his kids primarily.

And his kids have basically...

Does his wives really want to hear from him?

They have the names you'd expect.

You got to guess, guess one of the names.

I mean, before we start, should we show Jamie the fucking cover?

Yeah, let's let's show Jamie the cover.

Why not?

Why not?

Jamie, you want to describe that to our listeners on uh who are listening because it's a podcast and you shouldn't watch it on video?

Hello, video listeners.

We love you.

We love you so much.

Stop looking at us.

Stop looking at us, you freaks.

I'm guessing, okay, let me guess.

Uh, Chase,

Griffin,

uh,

Nathaniel.

Damn, Jamie.

No, no, that's a bunch of big, big L's.

Yeah, no.

First one, which you should have gotten, Gunner.

Okay.

You should have gotten Gunner.

Gunner,

Obama, and

Gunner Jackson, Peter Boone.

And that's the one he gives two names for, so I'm guessing his first name is Peter Boone.

Kinsey, Luke, Rex and Gwendolyn and Lil Nuke and Lil Nuke Gunner and Rex are really sending me wow gunner coming in hot good stuff man surprised there's not a hunter in there that's yeah hunter that's okay that that I might have gotten to hunter this cover is is

nuts so he's that can't be his body that's not his body he I mean if he's on enough tested trend sure I'm sure he's taking steroids you know I I'm really struggling with

the neck to head ratio.

There's photoshopping going down there.

You can see a big we the people tattoo on his forearm.

He's like waving a flag.

It's just like the dip shittiest cover.

The angle of the we the people tattoo only makes sense in the context of this picture.

Like if he, if this, that was normally the angle it was at, it would be crooked.

But that's what, but but this is clearly AI.

This is, I, this is this is not this is this is clear

this is not his body no but there's there's things that were done here but i appreciate the i would love to see him actually try to do this at the top of it it says and quote pete pulls no punches with this book yeah sean hannity yeah nice nice it's always it's always fun with this stuff because you're like there's no way sean hannity wrote this book but then in some ways there's no way that pete hegseth wrote this book do you think he could it was ghostwritten or do you think he wrote it?

Let's let's let's let Robert read some and then we'll give our opinion.

I think he he does write, you know, he's got this editorial position.

He definitely writes some of it.

I suspect it's a thing where it gets like, you know, massaged by a real writer, but there's a lot of it that seems very Pete, right?

In fact, the opening after he lists his kids' names, he gives a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, right?

Every chapter opens with a quote from a great American, usually Donald Trump, but this one's Theodore Roosevelt.

There is not room in the country for any 50-50 50-50 American, nor can there be but one loyalty to the stars and stripes.

Right?

Which, you know, I might say that, well, if your loyalty is to your weird interpretation of Christianity over the Constitution, you know, maybe you're not 100%, anyway, whatever.

That's not how he sees it.

So here's how the chapter opens.

Our American Crusade, Chapter 1.

Take a moment to consider your part in the miracle of the 2016 election, the history we made as sons and daughters of freedom, for the left that humiliating defeat strengthened their resolve to achieve their ultimate goal, erasing America's soul, culture, and institutions.

We are the ones standing in their way and have been targeted for annihilation.

Wow.

I like that he adds it a little.

He's like, on top of being a motherfucking piece of,

he's also kind of bitchy.

He's like, I'm praying for my haters.

I'm praying for all my haters on the left.

Oh, no, he's not praying for him.

He is, this is a book about how we need to kill the left, right?

That is, that is his, and like every allegation here is an admission, right?

That, like, because he's constantly talking, the left wants to kill us all.

They want to wipe us all out.

That's why we have to have total victory against them, right?

It's a like, it's, it's this, you know, they're as bad as we are.

So we have to do to them what we wanted to do to them anyway, but we can pretend we're defending ourselves, right?

Right.

Yeah.

They're, they're, they're even worse.

We got to get them first.

Yeah.

He goes on to claim that we, the people, we all feel that, quote, the other side, the left, is not our friend.

We are not esteemed colleagues nor mere political opponents.

And I think this part is valuable.

I think there's some of this that I really would like to shove in the hands of like, especially a lot of elected Democrats, because Hegseth very neatly sweeps away the claims that are made by guys like Biden that like, well, there's good Republicans.

We got to work with them.

You know, we need a strong Republican Party.

It's just, you know, some of this MAGA stuff, we got to dust off it.

But like, it's good to have strong conservatives in government with us.

And Hegseth is making the point that no.

Like there's no conservatives that you can trust because we, the left, like, we are not esteemed colleagues and we're not political opponents.

We want to destroy you.

You can't work with us, right?

And that's, that is the truth about modern conservatism, about the Republican Party.

You can't work with them, right?

They've made it clear it should be obvious, but a lot of mainstream Democrats refuse to fucking believe that.

No, no, no.

They're just, yeah, I mean, well,

best of luck with that project because it feels like if there's one thing mainstream Democrats aren't going to do, it's read a direct threat against them and take it seriously.

Right, right.

And there are direct threats in here.

Hexeth goes on to say, we are foes.

Either we win or they win.

We agree on nothing else.

Okay.

Maybe treat them like that, guys.

You know, that's what they're saying.

No, no, no.

They just, they, they, we need to empathize.

We need empathy with these guys.

I, yeah, I, I, I'm done with that.

Uh, I was raised these guys.

I don't have empathy for me when I was this kind of person.

Like, I suck.

Uh, so Pete goes on to brag that the U.S.

has the top economy and military, but that our cultural and educational institutions, America's soul, have succumbed to leftist rot.

And even a once-in-a-generation electoral miracle like 2016 won't be enough to save us, which is funny considering how 2024 went down.

A lot of this book is like darkly funny in light of the fact that they won in 2024 and lost in 2020.

So

Pete says that our future existence as sons and daughters of freedom can only happen if after the quote categorical defeat of the left.

Thus, this time in our history calls for an all caps American Crusade.

Yes, a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom.

Wow, title dropped, title mentioned, title mentioned.

Good stuff.

I like that he put it in caps just in case it wasn't clear.

You got to put it in caps.

You got to put it in caps.

I mean, the rhetoric is like, I guess, kind of what I would expect.

Does he get specific?

Is there, does he, is the book about the plan?

I mean, kind of.

Pete's not a great planning guy.

He's not a great knowing how to.

He's not going to be a great war leader guy for that reason.

Step one, allocate one-third of the budget to parties for me.

There's some of that, but it's mainly about getting, it's mainly about getting everybody like riled up for an existential battle that he believes 2020 was going to be, right?

Like this, this crusade of, you know, it's trying to get people on the side of extermination, right?

Hegseth then directly cites the First Crusade as his example of what we need to return to.

He describes the First Crusade as happening a thousand years ago after years of Christians or Europeans ceding land to Muslim hordes.

The Pope finally got around to declaring a crusade in order to save Europe and his knights marched to war under the cry, Deus Volt, or God wills it.

Now, I should interject here because Pete has a Deus Volt tattoo, and this is a meaningful term on the far right and the neo-Nazi right, right?

And I have to interject here.

First off, all of the history here is nonsense, right?

Like his history of the Crusades is not accurate.

The Guardian interviewed that.

That was my question.

I was like, this isn't sounding right.

We're going to talk about that first.

Okay.

The Guardian interviewed Matthew Gabriel, who's a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech, and he pointed out there were absolutely no incursions to mainland Europe.

If anything, Islam was kind of on the retreat in Iberia and other places as well.

So there was no large geopolitical shift or any kind of immediate threat of Islam taking over Europe, right?

Like they were not, in fact, on the defensive when the Crusades started.

Well, that doesn't sound good, and it doesn't serve his point.

This is just another reminder that in mainstream publishing, fact-checking is not an allocated part of the budget.

No, it's not.

You got to do that as a people.

They don't give a shit anymore.

You got to pay out of pocket if you want that shit.

Yeah, no.

Because there's no money in being accurate.

Right.

Yeah.

Books wouldn't sell as well.

So Pete is not at all alone in taking Deus Volt on as a rallying cry.

White supremacists have used it as a catchphrase for years now, and he's mainly noteworthy for being the most prominent political figure in the country to do so.

After the first Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which is the first time many reporters and regular Americans saw the phrase in use by Nazis and other white supremacist marchers, outlets like NPR published interviews with experts like Medieval Academy of America had Lisa Davis, who pointed out that Europe during the Crusade period was not white, and that far-right marchers at Charlottesville adorned themselves with symbols like that of Saint Maurice, who was regularly featured on Crusader livery and was himself an Egyptian man, right?

That, like, even a lot of these things that they're like, we were all white, like this, this beautiful saint that the Crusaders marched under, Molly Valley was born in Egypt.

Like, that is simply an African man.

Like,

insane.

I mean, I'm like, is this just like a group of people?

I mean, obviously, just brain dead people, but like, I think about how many older movies, and then also movies I grew up on that essentially portray Egyptian people as white or at best

Italian looking.

It's in part because like they're in, yeah, I I mean, one, one reality of it is that everyone in the Mediterranean basin looks more Mediterranean than like they do anything else, right?

Once you get right up to the, like, because there's a lot of interchange between those cultures, right?

And the other thing is that at this period of time, whiteness doesn't exist as a concept, right?

If you were to go back, like, think of it, go back to the Roman Empire and tell them, like, this guy is not as much of a person to you because of their skin color.

They'd be like, what are you talking about?

This guy's less of a person because he's not a Roman.

Like,

that's what matters.

You're like, make no mistake.

Spoonman is not a person to me, but not for the reasons you think.

Not for that reason.

No, he's less human than me because he was born in a different place.

It is fascinating watching, yeah, just like how

everything needs to serve like his thesis, but and it really doesn't matter.

None of it works out.

And none of these people actually know anything about the Crusades, right?

Well, and the problem is, yeah, like

I'm glad that there were like medieval scholars that like corrected the record, but his followers don't care.

No, and it doesn't matter.

I'm doing this in part because like, yeah, this is, that's the kind of episode that this is, right?

Where you go through this and you're like, all right, what's accurate, what's not, but like, this doesn't, like, no one listening to this was like coming in as a Pete Hegseth fan because of the Crusade stuff and is going to be like, my God, he was wrong.

Like, that's just not the way anything.

It changes everything for me.

I wonder if there's one person.

Yeah.

Now, I should also note here that, because he uses Deus Volt.

He's got it tattooed on his body because he believes it was the rallying cry that Crusaders marched to war under during the First Crusade.

This This is very likely to be untrue, right?

This is actually the result of propaganda that came later.

Marburg historian George Strack has pointed out to the Catholic News Agency that Pope Urban II, who declared the First Crusade, never used the phrase Deus Volt himself.

And quote, only one chronicle, that of Robert the Monk, which was written around 10 years after the popes called a crusade at a signade in Clermont, France, quotes the exclamation at all, Strack explained.

The author was aware from another chronicle that the northern French crusaders used Deus Volt as a war cry or a sign of recognition among themselves.

Robert's aim was to present the Crusade as a divine and papilly-led project, which is why he claimed that Urban II had heard the war cry Deus Volt in Clermont and approved of it.

From the historian's point of view, however, this is implausible.

Even Robert's medieval contemporaries would have placed little trust in the chronicler.

It was only under the humanists of the 15th century that the monks' rhetoric received favorable attention again.

They found Robert's chronicle plausible, and so the war cry Deus Volt was quoted very frequently from then on, and soon the other reports about Urban's call from Clermont were forgotten, says Strach.

So this is probably propaganda from the beginning that there's not much evidence of at the time, that no one would have taken very seriously at the time, that 500 years later, like, you know, Chuds adopt.

1500s Chuds, right?

Never trust a Robert.

That's what I never trust a Robert.

That's

the core of history, of historiography.

Speaking of things that spew only lies,

just one of our sponsors.

The other sponsors, completely trustworthy.

One of our sponsors tells nothing but lies, and we won't tell you which.

You know who you are.

You know who you are.

Place your bets.

It's gonna be a fucking sports betting ad.

Yeah, no, the sports betting people are honest, right?

You'll go broke, but they're honest.

They're like, but you'll have a great time doing it.

You'll have a great time doing it.

We'll really tickle those dopamine receptors.

We've made it as addictive as drugs.

Oh, drugs.

Jesus, Robert.

What?

We're back.

So, for the sake of morale, it might be good for us to recall here that the Crusades were not successes in the traditional military sense of the word.

The First Crusade did have some initial victories and resulted in temporary Christian control of parts of the Holy Land, but this did not last long.

By 1187, less than 100 years, the great general Saladin had surrounded Jerusalem, right?

The long train of disasters for organized Christian militaries during the Crusades led to a surge in support for maniac cult leaders like Peter the Hermit, who gathered an army of starving hermits to march on the Holy Land.

Andrew Curry writes, quote, Peter's success was cited over and over again in the years to come.

The defeat suffered by better organized crusades led many to believe that it was the humble who were destined to succeed, not the proud, rich military classes.

In the end, these people's crusades ended in disaster too.

None ever reached the Holy Land, and most of the peasant crusaders were either slaughtered as they plundered their way across Europe or disbanded before ever reaching a port.

Without the resources to reach the Holy Land, most turned on more conventional targets, namely Europe's Jewish communities.

Why are we going to seek out our profanity and to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites for our Messiah when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him?

Was the rationale as recorded by a Jewish eyewitness?

So again,

most of the real cruiser, a large chunk of the real crusaders didn't even crusade.

They just went and murdered Jews

right in Europe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, okay, do we think

Pete Hegseth knows any of this?

No, I don't think he really reads much.

I am genuinely curious.

I don't think it would matter.

He just wouldn't trust any account you told him if it's different from what he already believes.

Right.

That's, I mean, I didn't, I don't know this about the Crusades.

I'm not, I got to say, I'm not a Crusades head.

Well, the gist of it, and this is a quote from medieval studies professor Matthew Gabriel, the Crusaders lost.

They lost everything.

Well,

maybe an American Crusade, not too bad an idea.

Watch the documentary Kingdom of Heaven for more.

Still holds up.

Banger of a film.

So again, none of this stuff works as a gotcha, right?

You're not going to convince anyone to change their politics by being like, actually, the Crusade sucked, right?

But I do think it's valuable to look at this history for our own.

like edification as a reminder that this too shall pass and that these kinds of people never manage to win the way they they think they will in the long run, because they suck at shit.

But also, the mere fact that they've doomed themselves doesn't mean that they won't cause even more suffering in their failures, right?

Those People's Crusades were all disasters, but a lot of Jewish communities suffered as a result, right?

Right.

Anyway, let's continue with Pete.

He goes from the Crusades to the American Revolution, probably the only periods in history that he's taken a passing interest in.

He notes that, like Crusaders and Patriots past, the red MAGA hat is a symbol for the need for violent action to secure liberty.

Only by going on offense against a left that surrounds them can conservatives survive.

Now,

the fact that this is written in the run-up to 2020 and the fact that that election went against them should say a few things to you, right?

We know now this was not the decisive or the last battle, but Hegseth writes as if it was and that the left would cause total annihilation if they won in 2020.

He notes that while there are millions of patriots, the country also houses hordes of people who don't share their allegiance and that their ignorance and ideologies threaten national survival.

Okay.

So, yeah, again, like the language here is very unsparing.

And this is how most of them think.

You can't, again, it's just important that Democrats understand you can't talk it out with someone like this.

They're not willing to talk to you.

Right.

And I mean, that's like their,

that's their whole thing.

It is interesting anytime you hear, I mean, I guess you hear it basically every day now, but but over time, I think in the last 10 years, where you just hear the us versus them in an increasingly upward line to the point where he's just like straightforwardly saying they're like the people who agree with me are Americans

and the people who don't aren't.

Yeah.

Yeah, which is like, I mean,

continued in that direction.

Yep.

So the next section of his book is about the two Americas, which he describes as America and the left.

And in order to highlight this, he gives us the story of two different immigrants, both named Omar.

Samara Omar, who is an Iraqi who fought with Hegzeth.

He was an interpreter after the U.S.

invasion and later immigrated to the U.S.

legally.

The other Omar is, of course, Illinois who he calls the Somali Omar.

Oh,

we're out of it.

Oh, no.

He's he is.

This is, I mean, this is like peak Ilan Omar brainworms period 2020.

Not that it's much less now.

Like, I feel like it still got worse.

It's still pretty bad.

It's still bad.

Like, it's just, there's, it's more of a topic of discussion, I guess.

Yeah, okay.

Um, maybe just because this was to Omar's, good lord, it's nuts.

Uh, his attitude is the common one you'll see on the right, that Illin was graciously led into this country and has done nothing but spit in its face.

I don't think we really need to deal with this point, save to note that even in the America of 2025, even someone like Pete's interpreter Omar, who fought alongside U.S.

soldiers, aren't qualified to stay here.

Earlier this year, the United States revoked special status to Afghan people who helped the United States in its war against the Taliban.

Per MSNBC, the Trump administration told them, quote, that they've got to self-deport by May 20th back to a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

If America can't honor its word to those who bled for it, a retired U.S.

colonel told me, why would anyone trust us again?

This isn't just immigration policy.

It's a test of our moral credibility, and we're failing.

Now,

Jamie.

Yes.

I've seen the U.S.

in enough war zones and talked to enough people who believed in our promises to them when they fought alongside us that I can say say there's no point in my lifetime or the lifetime of anyone listening to this show in which we had moral credibility or we're trustworthy friends, right?

It's like we're also recording this.

What period of time are you talking about?

We're also recording this at a time where, again, like both of his examples are people who could just get plucked off of the street and kidnapped by ice.

Like it does, citizenship has nothing to do with it.

Well, again, that's part of what's interesting about the timing this comes in is that in 2020, as even as like a Pete Hagseth Republican, you still had to pretend that you were like okay with multiculturalism as long long as they were pro-American, right?

That like, no, this Iraqi interpreter of mine is a great American.

He's fully integrated, right?

He gets to stay here because he did all the right things.

And as soon as they got into power, like, oh, actually, no, we don't give a shit.

All that matters is your skin color, right?

Like, that's, and that's the reality, right?

Under the regime that has given Pete Hegseth power.

Yeah.

Um, but he spends a lot of his book talking about uh the Omar who fought with him, who he calls Texas Omar now because he successfully immigrated to the and integrated into the Houston suburbs.

So we should talk a little bit here about Pete Hegseth's wartime experiences in Samara, which is less than about a hundred, I think it's like 80 miles or something northwest of Baghdad.

At age 26, Pete was a lieutenant in the Army National Guard when he joined the 101st 3rd Brigade Combat Team.

He was deployed in 2005.

Prior to this, Hegseth had experienced what you might call an atypical global war on terror career.

Again, he graduated from Princeton.

He started working at Bear Stearns.

And, you know, the same time he'd gotten a position with the Doomed Finance Company, he enlisted in the National Guard.

And he was first deployed after 9-11 to Guantanamo Bay before coming back and working in finance for a while and then volunteering to fight in Iraq, where he became a platoon leader.

He seems to have served like functionally, did the job reasonably well.

There's not like

shocking reports or anything on it.

He was kept away from liquor, probably.

I was about to say, I was like,

why did he do that job competently?

Although he hadn't really kept drinking it started drinking heavily at this point oh right because that would that was after he got back okay and there is a there's an interesting washington post article that quotes one of his fellow officers who was active duty he was like i was actually surprised to see a national guard guy doing the same things hegseth was doing and i just assumed that it was because he was planning for a political career and thought a combat tour would help right um interesting okay yeah and you run into if you if you've known people who were in like if you know enough military guys they all have stories of like yeah this guy was definitely doing it because he was trying to like set up a career later down the line and wanted, you know, a combat action badge or something.

It's like seeing an influencer at a volunteer event.

Right, right, right.

Sure.

Interesting.

So I'm going to quote from the Post's article here.

Charlie Company, numbering about 140 men, was considered the brigade's most aggressive unit, engaging threats with a bravado that would later draw scrutiny from senior leaders, said people familiar with the deployment.

As recounted by The New Yorker in 2009, Charlie Company was nicknamed Kill Company and maintained a whiteboard listing confirmed kills, including civilians that each platoon had notched.

The former officer who served in another company within the battalion said the behavior exhibited by Hegseth's infantry company was viewed as a little bit strange by those on the outside.

We joked sometimes that they were on their own crusade down there.

Great stuff.

Okay.

Great stuff.

Good lord.

Okay.

Now, what's interesting is when the New Yorker reports on this initially, Hegseth would claim that I actually complained about how aggressive we were to our company commander.

And it's specifically that he complained about how they were ordered to have their weapons ready when when they were entering targeted buildings because he believed that basically having fingers on the trigger would lead to higher civilian casualties.

And that after making these complaints, he was reassigned.

I don't know how true this is, right?

I don't know if that's something he made up when he thought it would sound better.

Right.

When was that interview conducted?

It was like 2009.

I wonder how I feel like he wouldn't say that today.

So do I.

He wouldn't claim it, at least, right?

Yeah.

But his old unit remained in the field after he got transferred.

And as the insurgency hit a new peak of violence, they wound wound up as part of a raid on an island believed to be a training center for Abu Musabil's or Qawis Aqi or Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

This is like the precursor organization to ISIS.

A number of civilians are massacred during this attack.

The soldiers who kill them claim initially that they're all military-aged males, which is a term for we shot some fucking teenager, but like, look, he's pretty big.

An army investigation revealed that civilians had been detained and executed while detained, and that the killings had been covered up.

Two soldiers ultimately pled guilty to murder and related charges and received 18-year sentences.

One soldier who testified was sentenced to nine months, and another who didn't was convicted of negligent homicide, which was overturned on appeal.

Now, there is speculation that Hegseth has since seized upon the issue of U.S.

troops being tried for war crimes as a result of this.

And for the entirety of his time in the political spotlight, he has since backed prosecuted soldiers, including war criminal Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, claiming the rules of war unfairly tie the hands of men in the field.

That Washington Washington Post article, which interviewed a number of his colleagues, ends on this note.

The former Army officer who served with Hegseth in Iraq said he believes he has latched onto populist scenarios in a quest for personal gain.

When news of Hegseth's potential nomination emerged, old acquaintances from those days got back in touch with one another, the former officer said.

One text he received especially stood out.

All it said was WTF question mark.

Yeah.

Great stuff.

All right.

Great stuff.

All right.

It's just, it's everything that leads to horrific war crimes in the modern age are deeply embarrassing like just yeah really really lazy texting and also the fact that in between his

um his stints in the service that he found time to work at bear stearns he found yeah yeah break a little bit of time to work at creator the american economy

like it's just it's you know what a what a multi-hyphenate really yeah um i mean this i in in your view I mean, this just seems like he's slowly, you know, working behind the scenes to justify civilian deaths so that he can ideally escalate to the job he is now, killing civilians

with no consequences for anyone.

Yeah.

Yep.

So

the next chapter of this book, he compares, spends several pages comparing different statements by Illinois and his buddy, Texas Omar, in order to talk about how much Illin hates the United States.

One of his points is that his friend describes U.S.

helicopters as looking like angels because at one point he was under fire and he got rescued by a helicopter.

And Illin describes them as looking like the devil because she was a civilian in Somalia and saw U.S.

helicopters kill civilians.

And Seth is like,

no civilians were killed by Americans in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, right?

Which he describes as a heroic defensive action by U.S.

forces.

And the reality is uglier.

Well, we don't have perfect accounts for how many civilians died in the fighting.

It was between 300 and 700 people who died total, and at least two to 300 of those were civilians, right?

And I'll personally note, I have watched an Apache helicopter destroy, like basically murder an apartment building.

And yeah, it looks like the devil.

Have you ever seen one of those things empty its entire payload?

It's a fucking nightmare.

It's very scary.

Yes.

Objectively.

I mean, it's like, not only is it obviously racist to have this like weird chart of two people with the same last name, but like to just present it with a total void of context.

He just doesn't even understand how war works that you'd be terrified of

not on your side that is very deadly.

Yeah.

Yeah, who are killing people around you.

Okay.

Okay.

It's one of those things, like, yeah, man, if you're like, I get it, if you're completely surrounded by the enemy and then a chopper comes in and blows them all away, you'd be like, that thing ripped.

That thing's cool.

But people have different experiences with helicopters, you know?

Like, depending on whether or not they're being shot at by them.

Not to come down too hard on the other Omar, but like, weird to call a helicopter an angel as it is.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, and I don't know, again, we don't actually ever get to talk with that Omar.

Right.

I haven't found any articles interviewing him.

He doesn't, like, I've Googled around trying to find anyone who talked to this guy.

We only have Pete's recollection of him.

How much do we want to bet he made up a guy?

I don't know.

He certainly, if he's real, there's no way he's going to talk out and like correct the record if Pete jinjited because then he'll get deported, right?

Yeah, stay as far away from him as possible.

So I don't know.

I don't, he, and the important part is that Pete does not bring in this Omar as a real person with a real story.

He brings him in as a foil to his created image of a social justice warrior who never had to fight for anything, right?

Such people, he argues, take advantage of 50-50 Americans who lack grittiness and historical perspective.

He describes these people, so you've got the evil leftists, and they take advantage of these kind of like milquetoast 50-50 Americans who he calls squishies, right?

For their lack of bullying this issue.

Why does he call them squishies?

Because they're not willing to fight, because they're not racist and violent, right?

Like they're too squishy.

They're not willing to kill the left, right?

They think we can coexist.

I really don't like that.

It's him talking about like conservatives who are not like outright fascists, right?

Those are the squishies.

Okay.

So it's cool.

cool.

It's good stuff.

Okay.

Sorry.

Apologies to the squishies.

I love you guys.

Sorry, squishies.

Yeah.

Great stuff.

And it's interesting, you know, the thing he's trying to do here, because he has a whole bit in this about how, like, these people don't like to see themselves as political and that's a problem because like we're in a political war.

His whole thing is he's trying, he has to convince these people that like you need to become political in order to embrace a politics of defensive annihilation against the left, right?

And the left is everything but Trump, you know?

Like, that's what he's trying to convince these like moderate Republicans to do.

Quote, for me, awakening has been a progression over many years, informed by multiple iterations of learning, and mostly failure.

First, I had to get informed, then I denied the magnitude of the leftist problem.

Next, being idealistic, naive, and new to the political arena, I played within the confines of the status quo.

Now, as I have some worldly success in a large family, protecting my nest is tempting.

I understand what is required of 100% American.

The sacrifice, the struggle, the uncertainty, like the uncertainty of stealing from two different veterans organizations to get drunk.

Yes.

The uncertainty of playing grab ass with all your secretaries.

Yes, sacrifice.

Yeah, separating your employees by party and not party.

Look, these are the things ultimately that are going to protect Gunnar Heg Seth.

Yeah.

These are who's.

Finally, finally.

Yes.

Okay.

We end the introduction,

the first chapter with a call to arms.

follow it.

That's chapter one.

That's chapter one, baby.

And we follow it with two more quotes.

These are both from Donald Trump, and I find them funnier than I should.

Quote one, you're a sleaze, candidate Donald Trump to a reporter from ABC News, 2016.

You're a warrior, Pete, a fucking warrior, President Donald Trump, November 2019.

Why are those together?

Why are you

just contrasting him shit talking ABC to him saying nice things to him?

He's telling a story.

It's just so cool.

So cool.

It's like, wow.

Okay, Pete.

We're all very impressed.

Bad is to reporter as warrior is to me a smiley face.

It's like so funny.

It's so funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's good stuff.

So yeah,

we'll talk about the next chapter, but I think it's probably time to end part one.

Jamie?

Okay.

Moftus?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You want to plug anything?

Yeah, my book, Raw Dog, The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, just came out in paperback.

And I just released a, i i just did a an audio book for the one and only chuck tingle hell yeah um we're donating all of the the proceeds to the la uh the la street vendors fund uh because in la they're kidnapping ice is kidnapping people off the streets so uh we're raising money to um you know help street vendors stay in while maintaining their living.

The name of the audiobook is This Lesbian Hot Dog Gets Me Off.

Also, she is a doctor.

Also, she's vegan.

Wow, that's a title.

That's so much better than American Crusade.

And it's a story.

It is a tale.

So if you want to listen to that, donate five bucks to the Street Vendors Fund.

If you don't want to listen to that,

if you don't want to listen to me, read Chuck Tingle Hot Dog Smut.

You're wrong, but you should donate five.

You are wrong.

You're wrong and a bad person.

Let's just say it, Jamie.

Let's just say it.

You're a bad person, and God will not recognize you on the day of judgment.

He won't know your face.

To not listen to this lesbian hot dog gets me off.

Also, she's a doctor.

Also, she's vegan.

It's not just homophobic.

It's anti-women and STEM.

It's anti-women and STEM.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well,

this is good.

That's right.

Those are my vlogs.

Yeah.

Vlogs done.

Go to hell, everyone.

I love you.

Love you too.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at BehindTheBastards.

This is an iHeart podcast.