The real Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense

Updated on 8/19/26

The real Pete "WhiskeyLeaks" Kegsbreath

The Secretary of Defense is responsible for overseeing the world's largest bureaucracy, the Department of Defense, with over 2.6 million employees and a budget of over $840 billion.

Trump picked MAGA cult member Pete Hegseth for the job. Hegseth is unqualified. Even Trump's most loyal supporters acknowledge Hegseth's lack of relevant experience. Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist during his first term, said that Hegseth has "never run a big organization" and is "kind of a madman."

David Rothkopf, the global affairs columnist for the Daily Beast, reported that experts in the military and former employees of the Defense Department consider Hegseth’s record “to be the most egregious example of defense management malpractice in our history."

Here are a few important facts you should know about Pete Hegseth:

• Hegseth says women should not be in combat roles.
• Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of rape to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement.
• Hegseth published a column in college that claimed having sex with an unconscious woman is not rape.
• Hegseth is a serial philanderer, making him a target for blackmail.
• Hegseth criticized injured veterans who receive government assistance.
• Hegseth praised “waterboarding," blasted the Geneva Conventions.
• Hegseth dismissed moral concerns about the use of nuclear weapons.
• Hegseth pushed Trump to pardon service members convicted of war crimes.
• Hegseth said the United Nations should be shut down.
• Hegseth has a tattoo associated with white nationalists.
• Hegseth is a member of a network of Christian supremacist churches whose spiritual leader is twisted Doug Wilson who preaches a patriarchal society of male dominance, holy war, and iron discipline. In Wilson's book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, he wrote: “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” Wilson also has called feminists “a large army of singularly unattractive and bitchy women” and said women serving in the military are “loathsome” to God — an observation that explains Hegseth’s hostility to women in senior military leadership. This is the brainwashed shit Hegseth subscribes to.
• Hegseth said rising Muslim birth rates were causing "a slow motion 9/11."
• Hegseth promoted an editorial comparing same-sex marriage to bestiality.

Hegseth has no business being in the position of Secretary of Defense.