Orphan Brutal: A Historical Profile of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Brutal American

In ancient days, armies were led into battle by kings and emperors who fought on the frontlines of war. From Caesar to Napoleon, participation in direct combat was understood to be an implicit prerequisite to wielding power. There is a pale shadow of this pre-modern idea today in the expectation that a president should have served in the military to be commander in chief. Leading from the front is a pre-modern idea, because leading from the front emphasizes charisma, direct warrior brutality, and strength; in short, the shedding of blood by hand. By contrast, modern war emphasizes the mastery of strategy, politics, logistics, and timing; Napoleon was the first and last fusion of the two, of the pre-modern emperor and the modern general.

Pete Hegseth is a modern general, but not the modern general type that most people think about. Rather, he is modern is a different way—the brute way, the anti-modern way. Men like Pete are not made by accident and do not rise to power on their own. They are always the brutal orphans of an abandoned dream.

In this article, I want to tell you the story of a time when this has happened before. I want to tell you how what began as a scholarly, strategic, and modern effort to conquer the world on the part of the British Empire became, over time, less, not more, sophisticated and more, not less, racist, evangelical, and brutal.

And then I want to tell you the story of Pete Hegseth.

Making brutal people is easy. Doing so takes about eighty years. There are only three ingredients, social events, or eras that produce “brutal” people in a modern society. Those are a dream, a failure, and an orphan—almost always the orphan of a foreign war.

Pete has been covered by the media poorly. Few have taken the time to try to really grasp who he is, what motivates him, and why he is the way he is. This is because he appears to be an unlikeable and easily hateable person.

But this is The Meteor, and here we don’t shy away from ugliness, corruption, or anything else. At The Meteor, we go deep, deep into the past.

To understand Pete Hegseth, we have to go back to the first days of the British Empire in Afghanistan over 200 years ago.

Come with me, and let’s find out who Pete is, who made him, and what may drive him.

A Dream of Words in Amber

Imagine something with me. Imagine the year 1815. You are writing alone in your tent—a relatively luxurious home compared to the rest of the camp.  You are writing with ink and quill in a weathered, leather-bound journal. This is the fiftieth journal you have almost entirely filled with detailed notes, text, and drawings of your journey to the ancient capital of the kingdom of the sun, Khorasan, Kabul. Today, this is the capital of the land we call, Afghanistan.

You are writing on a portable wooden desk carried with you from your home in Scotland halfway around the world. You are at this point in your life, thirty, almost forty. You are mapping something that no one in your small hometown of Dumbarton, a small cozy place nestled in the lush green lowland hills of Scotland, could ever fathom or comprehend. What is most surprising to you of all throughout your journey in Afghanistan is not how strange and different the people are, but how alike they are to the warrior ancestors you grew up hearing stories of.

You’re Scottish. At this time in the history of Scotland, Scots were modern. But they were made modern by laws that made patterned kilts and the possession of traditional arms illegal. The family cloth and broadsword were set aside for the sake of the rise of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith. Your people gave the world the invisible hand and, in exchange, you lost the broadsword.

In these years, there was idea of society—a sort of early anthropology of law—that had emerged as a critical tool of explanation of the world. You believed, as did almost every educated person you knew, that there were two types of peoples in the world and that history was the story of their interactions with each other. The first type was the valley people, who settled in lush lands where agriculture could blossom and bloom. This type of people gave birth to advanced civilization, writing, mathematics, law, philosophy, as well as weakness and decadence.

The second type was the mountain people, who in their harsh homelands developed not the orderly law of neatly plowed fields, but the law of custom, of warriors, the law of the sword and the clan. Forming advanced society was harder in the harsh mountains, where food was scarce, where nomadism was encouraged, and where the beasts were still yet wild and terrible. Simpler forms of life emerged, of law as culture, of kinship, and clan as the organizing principles of life—not the state and the church.

To you and so many, the story of history was the story of mountain peoples conquering valley peoples, then becoming them, and being conquered themselves. This was the arc of history. The rise and fall of civilization was on the back of this cycle, the cycle of the strong and the weak. The stupid and the wise.

Your people, the Scots, were mountain people. This has given you a strange relationship with modernity. You have in fact, the fresh perspective of a newcomer or outsider to the world of rationality, empiricism, and Enlightenment. You can see both the benefits of modernization and the cost: Scotland has never been richer and more advanced; yet you have never been farther from home, from the sword. Now, you have banks in your own homeland. You have trade. And there you are, a Scottish aristocrat writing in your journal beneath the black mountains of the Hindu Kush.

Even more beautiful, the most beautiful and revolutionary fact of the Scottish golden age: though your men were no longer warriors, they could read.  

They could read the book you were writing. The story you were telling captured all these feelings, because in the geometric patterns of the Afghan cloth you saw the red and green squares and stripes of tartan; in the pulwar and the jezail, you saw the broadsword. In short, you saw a mountain people like yourself before modernity turned them into scholars, sailors, and soldiers.

Imagine how you might feel, writing by candlelight, about whether to bring modernity to another people or not. What would you choose? The broadsword? Or Thomas Paine?

Your name is Mountstuart Elphinstone. You would go on to become the Governor of Bombay. You would be known for your liberalism because whether you would choose the broadsword or Paine, the real Elphinstone chose Paine. He chose to place his faith in the universal liberal idea that anyone could become enlightened through education. This choice, this optimism and liberal belief in the human capacity to rise above squalor and brutality, to change both mountain and valley people into something more than human animals condemned by the terrain, was the choice he and the early British empire made. Like turning Scotsmen into readers, Elphinstone sought to turn Indians into Englishmen, through law, medicine, and literacy. Yet, change took time.

This was the first historical choice you made. The second was when you turned your own journals into a book, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul. To this day, to the very present, there has been no book in English that has provided a more detailed and influential account of Afghanistan. Everything written since are called “footnotes” to Elphinstone.

Decades later, after the defeat of the British expedition to Afghanistan in 1842, only one man survived: a doctor. The loss confirmed to the early empire by blood that the Afghans were a mountain people. While liberals governed the valley people in mainland India, the British defeat at the hands of the Afghans reinforced the fantasies of Elphinstone, that the proud Afghans were a warrior people.

The Dance of Fat and Failure

We’re going to take a step forward now. The brutal dance of social change as the result of empire has begun. The first step was optimism and liberalism, but now the year is 1858. Before this, a private corporation, the East India Company, was responsible for the management of British India. Men like Elphinstone served as company governors of India, ruling as liberals. Until they made a fatal, terrible error, an error that would change the course of history by breaking the back of universal liberalism on the crux of animal fat.  

Imagine something with me. You are British officer—this time you have no name—and the year is 1856. You are sitting in a fortress in Bombay, a bustling, busy city of millions. You are by lantern light reading reports of rebellion.

The story begins, rationally, even sociologically, like Elphinstone might write it. At the time, the company army in India had tens of thousands of Muslim and Hindu soldiers. In fact, these soldiers called sepoys outnumber you six to one. There are 300,000 sepoys. You have 50,000 men. You therefore must devise a strategy to rule vast numbers of people who are different from you. The liberal solution to this problem is very simple and clear: to rule someone different from you, turn them into you. You must directly educate, uplift, and enlighten.

Elphinstone and so many others had tried that, and yet, the sepoys were revolting. The rational causes of the rebellion were clear: there was the fear of high-caste Indians in the army that they might lose their status as Indian princelings and become completely subject to the company’s rule, reducing their power as landed gentry; the fear of Christian evangelicals working to change India by demanding the abolition of sati, or bride burning; the threat that sepoys may be sent abroad to China to serve in wars, and may not simply be kept in India; and the huge resentment that too many officers were British and not Indian. 

Yet, these rational fears did not spark the revolt. No. This is critical for the dance of history. Irrationality won the day.

A technological innovation, the Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket, caused the revolution most directly. The rifled musket was more advanced, more accurate, and easier to load. To load the rifle, you must insert a greased cartridge into the rifle barrel and bite the cartridge with your teeth.

Muslims cannot eat pork, and Hindus cannot eat beef. The fear of sepoys was that the cartridges were greased with pork or beef tallow. To accommodate these fears, the company allowed sepoys to grease rifles themselves, but this only fed fears further. Worst of all, rumors that high-caste soldiers had lost their caste by biting the cartridge spread terror. After months of tension throughout 1857, one soldier, Mangel Pandey, declared himself in rebellion. Over the next several months, incidents grew until the revolt began in full. The revolt had a deeply religious fervor to it, a fervor that seemed irrational to the British government. After the revolt was put down, the East India Company lost control of India, and India was transferred to the Crown.

The conservative answer to the question, “How do you rule vast numbers of people different from you?” is different. The conservative answer is to rule people indirectly. Rather than changing a foreign people into your own people, simply rule those people through their already established institutions. Do not waste time eradicating bride-burning and do not educate anyone except the princes and princesses or the local lords and barons. Pay them vast sums of money and let them rule their people but be loyal to you. Rule people by ruling their rulers.

These two strategies of governance, liberal direct rule and conservative indirect rule conflicted with each other and in different places and in different times won out. Often, the overextension of one led to the rise of the other. After the Revolt of 1857, the conservative strategy won. Princely states were incorporated into the empire and ruled indirectly.

The conservative turn was the result of cynicism. No matter the work of the state, Hindus and Muslims were, at the end of the day, Hindus and Muslims. They could not be turned into Englishmen. Maybe there was something different, something special about the Scots and Irish and maybe even the Americans that allowed them to become enlightened and uplifted. Maybe that could never happen in India.

This attitude came to dominate the Empire for many, many years. As a second consequence of this view came a second debate over how the Empire should approach its borders. The two sides of this debate were those who advocated a forward policy and those who advocated a close policy. The forward advocates favored expansion and aggressive intervention into places like Afghanistan to put down revolts, while the close advocates favored a secure border and minimal expansion.  Though frontier attitudes were mixed, often conservatives—cynical about the value of conquest in the northwest—favored a close policy, while more liberal-minded officers favored expansion, including expansion of Enlightenment.

Hearts and Minds

The men who debated conservative or liberal, or forward or close, or direct or indirect rule were of a small group. At their smallest they were a few hundred officers around the British empire that wrote to each other and composed books for each other about the management of foreign peoples. At their height, there were maybe less than a thousand.

They were, in the beginning, literate, aristocratic, optimistic people, often more like scholars than warriors. But something changed. The conservative management of the empire and the long-term mission of rule put the desire for independence of subjects against the desires of the Crown, which meant that the Empire did not need soldier-scholars documenting plants and cloth patterns, but instead warrior-politicians to rule foreign enemies.

That meant that all these debates were, in the long run, forgotten. Only one thing remained, one piece of imperial practice outlasted and outlived all others. This practice has been used a dozen times around the world and always brings with it pain for human beings.

This practice was born from a brutal and heartfelt rejection of both sides of the debate, and that practice is captured in the terrible phrase, “hearts and minds.”

No more imagining.

This is not an interesting or good story. This is a dark story that has taken the blood and lives of millions of people in the strange, obsessive pursuit of conquering others. Tens of thousands of young men, including the brutal Americans to which we will shortly turn, have been marched into battle and death for the suicidal, 150-year-old idea of winning hearts and minds. That and countless more people have, in the process of having their hearts and minds one, been turned into blasted corpses and limbless victims of vast and terrible war machines.

Beyond the failure of both the conservative and liberal attempt to rule other peoples, there is one third and final strategy. Do not rule the people by changing them, do not rule the people through their rules, rule them by winning their hearts and minds, which, in practice, has meant for 150 years the bloodshed of thousands.

Robert Sandeman coined this phrase. He was a British frontier officer whose practices on the Baloch frontier, today southern Pakistan, were termed by contemporaries as the Sandeman System. If you have heard the phrase ever in your life, “winning the hearts and minds of the people,” you have heard the words of Robert Sandeman. You have heard words that were carried from Afghanistan in 1876, to Malaya in 1949, and to America in 2011. This is an idea that is only ever adopted by empires when they are failing badly.

The hearts and minds system, or the “Sandeman System,” was a collection of practices designed to stabilize the British Imperial Baloch frontier territory. This territory was at the time ruled by the Khan of Khelat. In 1866, Sandeman began developing his system in Dera Gazi Khan, which stabilized the area and allowed him to experiment with systems of tribal pacification. In 1876, Sandeman secured an agreement between the Khan of Khelat and his local tribal notables known as sardar that effectively put the Khanate under British control, which added a vast territory to the frontier and encouraged the Viceroy of British India to drop the policy of nonintervention. This also led to the British having stable supply lines in the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880. His success marked a turn in the British Indian Empire as the Empire’s close border policy, which favored no expansion beyond the frontier, was replaced by something else entirely: random aggressive action[MB1] .

In practice, winning the hearts and minds of the people meant that Sandeman had a castle, and he would sometimes go out into the tents of tribes and pay them. Sometimes he would drink tea with them and sometimes he would leave the castle and slaughter people. This system featured both expeditions led by Sandeman with little military support into tribal territory and quick and overwhelming military responses to trouble beyond the border. He also imported the jirga, or tribal council system, into Baluchistan to settle disputes between these local elites, mistakenly believing that this was a historical practice. If you have followed the history of the American war in Afghanistan, you probably know about all the “jirgas” we called for. You probably didn’t know that this is just the word for “council,” and that Sandeman made it a system of artificial government that we used in Afghanistan.

The reason why this Sandeman system mattered so much was because he finally offered a route beyond the intellectual trappings of British imperialism, that allowed the empire to finally secure its northwestern border. He brought action to a culture that wanted debate. The security of the border was critical to the empire. The fear was that if there was another revolt, the hill peoples would be the greatest threat. To prevent this, the British transformed their hill people in India, the Afghans and the Gurkhas, into the core of their subcontinental police force. This strategy was adopted by empires around the world, from Lebanon and Syria to Rwanda and Kenya. Norther border security meant subcontinental security because it meant the military was strong.

Sandeman mattered because he solved a critical problem: when others could not, he delivered security.

Another important element of Sandeman’s figure is the religious one. Sandeman was a radical Calvinist, a “Glasite” or Sandemanian Calvinist. Robert Sandeman the first, our Sandeman’s namesake and great uncle, was also the leading theologian of the church. This simple Calvinism, which rejected more complex theologies, was paired with Sandeman’s practice of ruling different peoples: rejection of the scholastic methods, and a retreat to simplistic beliefs about hearts and minds, which in practice on the frontier, meant kinglike rule by grace, bribery, and force.

This is not a dead or distant idea. This method of empire emerges in the West when liberals and conservatives fail. Hearts and minds is an alibi for rule that abandons the high culture of early conquest in favor of a simpler way to rule the world. This plan was passed down through literature to the British Empire fighting communists in Malaya, and from there taken to Afghanistan by the RAND Corporation and David Petraeus. Always and everywhere, this strategy was borne of decline.

The Fear of Wasted Blood

In 1868, northern European immigrants from Sweden and Norway founded the small town of Forest Lake in Minnesota, the same year as the ratification of the 14th Amendment and only a few short years after the American Civil War and the unification of Italy, the Risorgimento. The town was named “forest” for its abundance of timber. Today, Forest Lake is a small town of only 20,000 people.

Pete Hegseth was born there. According to Trip Advisor, the top five attractions of Forest Lake for 2025 are, in order, “The Fenway Fields, the Tower Park, the Walmart Supercenter, the Forest Lake beach, the Target Store.”[1] Pete Hegseth’s hometown has two superstores. The man himself has had three divorces, written four books, five affairs in his first marriage, is sixth in line for presidential succession, seven children, and he is the Secretary of Defense.

In Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that suffering is like a gas. No matter how little or how much one has, suffering will fill a person’s soul, as gas fills a room. As a young man, Pete Hegseth went to Princeton, not for the education, but for The Tigers. He entered university when I was two, in 1999. Writing of his desire to join the military, Hegseth says,

Think [of] George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, bitterly stuck at home. He’s haunted by the worry that his life is insignificant. As I recount in my first book—In the Arena—a stoic Vietnam veteran told me at nineteen years old, “Pete, whatever you do, don’t miss your war. To my virgin ears, he sounded cavalier. Was he a warmonger? Or was he just crazy? America was not [yet] at war, so I immediately dismissed it—but I never forgot it. Years later, not until I got back from Iraq in 2006 and then out the ass end of the political wringer in 2008, did I finally understand his point—and agree with it. For that veteran, his statement was not just about Vietnam, it was not about the rightness or wrongness of that war, and it certainly was not about a naked thirst for war. Through those four words—don’t miss your war—he spoke of honor. Of duty. Of courage. Of God and country. Of the arena. Like an evangelical preacher of America’s civil religion—and like Teddy Roosevelt—he had been to the arena, and was urging me.”

Believing the lesson of It’s a Wonderful Life is that George Bailey is a bitter loser who should have gone to war is a perfect window into Hegseth’s soul.

The search for meaning in modern American life is a search defined by blood.

The more blood you have shed, or can claim to have symbolically shed, the more you matter. In studies of ethnicity, anthropologists have often found that people nearly always identify with their ethnic identity that has suffered most.[2] 

For most people in America, the culture is empty of meaning. The culture is consumer culture, the culture of small towns like Forest Lake, where human life survives in hidden local beaches and little town parks, corralled by corporate superstores. In that culture, one can feel that there is something wrong. Both right and left are united in this respect.

In that culture, there is a hunger for a greater life of meaning. Suffering, sacrifice, and adversity—there are tens of millions of Americans who have truly suffered—they do so daily—through poverty and addiction and underemployment and overwork and loneliness. Parallel to them are a much smaller number whose live charmed lives, mostly without struggle, without pain, but therefore without meaning. This is not an endorsement of the banal idea that out there in the countryside there are wonderful poor people rich in the treasures of the heart—those people exist—and they often live next to terrible poor people too.

Pete Hegseth has always been a man in search of a war. He has always wanted a war so that, in his own words, he could someday “enter his house justified” having shed the blood required to make the house his own. His great fear and great motivation is that despite having shed the blood, his house is no longer his own.

After he finished at Princeton in 2003, he entered the Army as a second lieutenant. He briefly worked at Bear Sterns before serving at Guantanamo Bay—an alma mater of Republican leaders like Desantis. He later served in Iraq and won a Bronze Star. His star for valor was given to him because of his excellent service as a counter-insurgency instructor. He, like everyone of that era, was taught about the magic of hearts and minds. Counter-insurgency doctrine, especially under David Petraeus and after the creation of Field Manual 3-24, was simply hearts and minds. Pete even helped to write FM 3-24. Consider him a grandchild of Sandeman. Hearts and minds was the evolving logic of the day, the promised golden path beyond years of failing war.[3] The idea was, as the Romans learned from the Greeks, to learn from the British counterinsurgency in Malaya, or the Briggs’ plan. The Briggs’ Plan was a clone of Sandeman’s plan to win hearts and minds. Sandeman’s practice of rule in Afghanistan was transmitted across 150 years of history to ensure that as Sandeman sought to win hearts and minds in 1880 in Afghanistan, Pete Hegseth would too.

And like Sandeman, Pete made himself appear as a mythical master of counterinsurgency by leveraging his mystique and reputation into a media career. While Sandeman accomplished this through novels about himself and the mythology shared amongst the ranks of imperial frontier officers, Hegseth pivoted to politics and activism in his free time, which would serve him well someday on FOX.

But before that, he served in Baghdad. His vehicle was even hit by an RPG. He then taught counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Parallel to his military service, which was frequent, Hegseth had begun a political career. From 2006 and onwards he worked as a political operative for groups like Vets for Freedom. Despite his apparent hatred of neocons, he campaigned for John McCain. Notably, during these years Hegseth, like so many other Republicans, had not yet become an anti-interventionist, arguing against both withdrawal from Afghanistan and in favor of troop surges. One could almost not fault him for this—this was before the Trump, before Bernie, before an honest politics of empire on all sides. I won’t fault him for this, at least. That comes later.

Hegseth ran for office in 2012. He lost the primary to a more libertarian type, who then lost to Amy Klobuchar. Lucky for him, Pete’s loss meant he dodged the Senator’s staplers. Following the loss, he joined the Koch Brothers’ Concerned Veterans for America, which he left in 2016 due to his poor management and alcoholism. As Jane Meyer of The New Yorker has written,

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. 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, whom 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 former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”[4]

To understand Pete Hegseth, you need to know that he has a tattoo that says Deus Vult, which means God Will It.

Tattoos in modern America, like so much else for Generation X, Millennials, and Gen Z, became a key way to make meaning the hollower our culture has become. I believe that the popularity of tattoos for all of us lies in the fantasy that if we press a needle into our skin, if we bleed for a piece of art, that art has more meaning, permanence. By blood art is a promise. Maybe Pete believed that if the needle made him bleed enough, he could enter his house justified. Maybe Pete, when he had Deus Vult carved into his flesh, believed that if he bled enough and that the ink was deep enough, he could carve a path to God. But he did not end up serving God; he carved a path to Donald Trump.

Hegseth’s alcoholism is likely not the result of his service in the miliary. Quite the opposite, as he probably drank like a fiend before the military anyway. If you go to Princeton for The Tigers, you also go there for the bars. He has said on the record about his drinking, which I believe is a lie, that

I went from being in a combat zone to being in an apartment in Manhattan and without any contact other than phone calls here or an email here or there with the guys who I had served with.” He said, “I didn’t do much and I drank a lot trying to process what I had been through while dealing with a civilian world that frankly just didn’t seem to care.

I’ve heard this before, but I also have been close enough with enough veterans to know the truth. The civilian world, sure, whatever. He probably drank because he was bored, in the same way that so many dumb young Americans drank because the town hot stop was the Wal-Mart parking lot. Pete would drink whether he served or did not serve; but by serving, his drinking took on meaning. He did not drink because he served, he served so that he could drink with cause, to enter his house, after hours, late, drunk and justified.

Why might someone have such a drive to feel justified that they place themselves, purely by choice, in the path of a rocket propelled grenade?

Writing about Pete, his mother said,

I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.[5]

The modern right, the MAGA right, can’t decide on something. They are stuck between debasement and atonement. Is the abuse of women a historical norm going back two thousand years and more, and so not a problem at all, or is the abuse of women a mistake, a thing a man should feel guilt for?

In the private group chats of young right-wingers in D.C., the former attitude dominates. The cry is, “Repeal the 19th”, the cry is: “I feel no guilt for being sexist, homophobic or transphobia, for ten thousand years the law of man, before and under God, was the law of patriarch. I am ancient, based, you are new, and will pass by like the wind.” Young men on the right and some women are not “conservative”; they are paleo conservative, in the sense that their idol is the pre-1965 world, and the ten thousand years prior. For this cohort, the abuse of women is not a problem. Abuse is traditional, if not good, if not needed to keep women in their proper place. Call Trump an alleged rapist, call Hegseth sexist, they will look at you with eyes-wide and say, “based.” Much better than a gen-z boss and a mini.

On the other side, and much more politically prominent, is the promise of atonement and redemption. During Hegseth’s congressional hearing, Senator Mullin defended Hegseth, saying,

The Senator from Virginia, bringing up the fact, “What if you showed up drunk to your job? Well, how many Senators have shown up drunk to vote at night? Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign from their job? And don’t tell me you haven’t seen it because I know you have and then how many senators do you know have got a divorce before cheating on their wives? Did you ask them to step down? No. But it’s for show, you make a big show and point out the hypocrisy because a man’s made a mistake and you wanna say that he’s not qualified. Give me a joke It is so ridiculous that you guys hold yourself at this higher standard and your forget you got a big plank I your eye we’ve all made mistakes. I’ve made mistakes and Jennifer [Hegseth’s wife] thank you for loving him through that mistake. Because the only reason why I’m here and not in prison is because my wife loved me too…. …our lord and savior forgave me, my wife’s had to forgive me more than once too.

Senator Mullin, the only senator without a bachelor’s degree, a man with a net worth upwards of 10 million dollars, who has threatened to fight people in the Senate before, hinting at a past affair would have been news in any other era.

Mullin is a wonderful senator because he perfectly represents so many American guys. Guys without degrees that don’t care what Trump does because they’ve made mistakes too. They’re egalitarian, resentful, and fun if they’re your cousin, but not if they’re your uncle. They are also men who love tattoos and Christianity. This type of American is common now in the Republican Party, including famous ex-husbands such as Elon and infamous swingers Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Nancy Mace. In fact, to get mad at this type of American for their amorous adventures and hypocritical nature is silly because there are more Americans like that than there are Americans that are good, chaste, Christian people. And these Americans want nothing more than to be redeemed.

Pete is representative of MAGA now, which is torn between being based and being redeemed. Between regretting abuse and justifying abuse. Between the two, I would choose those who want redemption, because I think I’d rather spend the night with a guy who is a wasted fool, who wants to dance on stage with strippers, than with puritan teenagers who believe that men are entitled to wives, that transexuals should be killed, and that America should be a Catholic country. Every single time, I will take a bad drunk, lying, cheating Protestant over a good, principled Catholic.

This moral drama, though, is a sideshow to the drama of Pete Hegseth and the drama of hearts and minds, the drama of the simple solider. During the same hearing, Montana Senator Tim Sheehy questioned Pete, asking,

How many rounds of .556 can you fit in an M4 rifle? What size round is the M9 Beretta, standard-issue sidearm for the military fire? What kind of batteries do your put in your night vision goggles?

In 1858, I can imagine a man in the House of Lords asking the embarrassed officers of the East India company, “What tallow is used to load the Enfield rifle?”

When one elite fails, another rises. When that elite fails, and if there is no other elite to turn to, the simple, brutal men rise to power because they are not supposed to repeat the simple mistakes of the complicated, moral men.

Brutes or Brutal  

Vice President Vance and Hegseth are what Anne Applebaum, one of America’s “writers,” has termed a “brutal American,” writing that,

…the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand-new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.[6]

This came after Trump and Vance hosted Zelensky at the White House. Since then, the idea of “the brutal American” has entered the public conversation.

In the context of liberal America, Vance and Hegseth may in fact appear as something new. To their own fans they appear to be something old, a modern day Bill the Butcher—the movie version, not the real man. Hegseth and Vance are in fact not brutal. They are actually even smart, in their own way. We should better think of them as brutes like the Morlocks of The Time Machine, brutes who are made in the wreckage of civilization. They emerge as the result of decivilization, even deculturation. But with Morlocks like Vance and Hegseth, you also always get the sheltered stupidity of the Eloi, like Anne, who have the unmitigated temerity to think the “brutal American” could ever be “new.”

Making brutes is a long and difficult social process that takes time, money, adventurism, and failures. Brutes are always the orphans of something; they emerge like the children of the tarantula hawk or the phoenix from death. Understanding this is vital, because even after this administration, the brutes will be here to stay. They’re still being made because brute conditions are still around, and brute conditions make brutal people. Vance and Hegseth are men of a type, of a generation that has been made before.

The American and British men that conquered frontiers were, in the early days, well-read, intelligent men. They were Elphinstone and Lewis and Clark. They had complex and rational debates about foreign policy. They were, for the most part, equally comfortable in a university as they were in the outback, the mountains of the Navajo, and in the outskirts of Kabul. They were wise, intelligent, aristocratic, smart men. They built—and you may love this or hate this—the two most powerful nations in the world by accident and by choice. They committed heinous acts in pursuit of this and great acts as well.  

In the end, though, their hard work was inherited by a different type of man: a simple, charismatic, religious man who fed off public disillusionment with a scholastic empire, promising greatness through simple means among the ruins. Often, this second type of man rose to power because of the clear and simple mistakes of those that were supposed to know better.

The East India Company was supposed to know better than to hand out rifles full of animal fat. They did not, and they almost lost the British Empire India forever—despite their scholars, despite their books, despite the Account of the Kingdom of Caubul. Or maybe, because of all this knowledge, they thought that if they could show soldiers the magic of rifled barrels, they could push them beyond dietary superstition and to the Western way of pork, beef, and milk.   

I am fascinated by Pete and JD for the same reason that I am fascinated by Robert Sandeman: they are mostly right about the problems they see, mostly right the elites that they replace are failing, and mostly right that things need to change. Yet they inevitably fail to change things because they are not driven to the right answers by a desperate search for a good life for all of us, but instead, they are driven by quests—the quest of Sandeman to become a king in the north, to gain glory like Sean Connery and Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King.  For Pete, this is the quest to enter his home justified.

In, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes

Good leaders know their subordinates. They have a finger on the pulse of their culture. Bad leaders follow the political winds. Surely, a man who has been in the Army for forty-three years would have identified this supposed problem of massive military systemic racism before George Floyd was killed. Mark Milley never complained about racism in the ranks in the 1990s. Or the 2000s. Or the 2010s. Then suddenly, in 2020, racism was everywhere, [Hegseth quoting Milley] I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it. So, what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. “Veterans expressed much lower support for White supremacists than the U.S. population overall (0.7 percent versus 7 percent)” Turns out the military is less racist and less extreme than the US population. That was a fact, and is a fact. If you ask any veteran of the past forty years—except Mark Milley, of course—they would tell you that.

I agree with Pete Hegseth that Mark Milley made himself look foolish. He did something stupid and insane, and he, like every other elite leader almost overnight, agreed that racism was not eliminated in America and in fact was existing in the shadows of our hearts, minds, and institutions. This was a simple strategic mistake and emerged as a mistake because American liberals are like the liberals of the British Empire.

They believe in the universal equality of people. They believe achieving this goal is critical for human development. To achieve this goal, they believe the state should work to make different people into one better people. To fix America, for the liberal, meant to reforge America, to make White America and Black America one America in the image of the corporate family. To rule someone different from you, turn them into you; directly educate, uplift, and enlighten white Americans through DEIA courses, through land acknowledgments, through a vast literature on Whiteness. To stop racism, change the hearts and minds of people. In reality, these efforts did mostly nothing except make people more racist, more hateful, more aware of difference. The mistake was that liberals put gay tallow in the rifles of their fighting men and so American recruitment declined. People warned them, but the tallow went in the rifles anyway.

I would love to believe that recruitment declined solely because endless foreign wars are terrible, and people don’t want to fight them. But that is not true. There has always been a contingent of Americans that want to fight wars or, since we have moved from the draft, to serve as a career or for the significant benefits. Gay tallow mattered, much as pork fat did for the sepoys.

The month that Hegseth took office the recruitment crisis ended. White American men voted with their enlistment.[7] Condemn him, hate him, despise him—but give him that.

To understand why, ask yourself: would you rather spend time with 71-year-old Lloyd Austin, a devout Catholic and man of the highest integrity, or a womanizing alcoholic from Minnesota who loves to dance with strippers on a stage? Imagine you’re answering that question and you’re eighteen years old, and you’re from Boise, Idaho, and your town’s number one attraction—like Forest Lake, Minnesota—is a park next to a suburb, barely winning a slow race for first against a Wal-Mart supercenter.

Hegseth was right that Milley was wrong. But not only Hegseth hated this. Many people, including liberals and leftists, saw the public statements of men like Milley as stupid. But the tallow went into the rifles anyway.

Hegseth, wrote in his book,

political leaders and general officers (aka politicians in camo) espouse clever obfuscations about the purpose of our military (“Diversity Is Our Biggest Strength” being the absolutely dumbest of them all). They seem to think that somehow “Be All That You Can Be”—the long-touted and recently revived Army recruiting slogan—is more about personal growth, levels of diversity, and self-expression than deterring and, if need be, defeating the enemies of America. We’ve become a “You Be You” military.

And he repeated upon taking his role as his Secretary of Defense,

I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is our strength is our diversity. I think our strength is our unity. Our strength is our shared purpose, regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race. In this department we will treat everyone with fairness, we will treat everyone with respect, and we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission. That’s how it has been, that’s how it will be.

When the Supreme Court abolished affirmative action, they left one single exception: military service academies. The reason they left this as an exception was due to the belief that there was a distinct interest in ensuring that military academies have a racially diverse officer corps to lead a racially diverse military. The military and the Supreme Court both understand that affirmative action is required to ensure the officer corps is not fully white. Milley, leading the military in the wake of scandals over supposed extremism, the rape of women, drug trafficking, and at a time when racial tension was high in America and recruiting was plummeting, decided that the best route forward was a military that was acceptable to everyone.

Managing a multiracial military is not an easy task. The liberal strategy to manage the military has been, for decades, affirmative action: direct rule, the direct uplifting of minorities. The conservative alternative has always been segregation, rather than integration and affirmative action. Before 1948, the conservative strategy—segregation—was used in the American military.

Hegseth’s call for merit is actually not the conservative position. It is neither liberal nor conservative. Merit is simple, simple like winning hearts and minds. Promotion by merit sounds easy, simple—like winning a war by winning the hearts of the enemy’s people does until you put merit and hearts and minds into practice. What if one group feels that the system does not recognize their merit? What if they have legal rights you cannot ignore? What if merit standards are low because the military is a massive employer with a wide bell curve? What if merit results in a white officer corps?

Like hearts and minds counterinsurgency, merit as an alternative to integration or segregation rejects both the liberal and conservative positions. The merit-based approach to race in the military means that in practice, the officer corps would be white. That is not my opinion. That is the opinion of the Supreme Court. That is not a desirable policy in the military because that means that black and Hispanic men will almost entirely have white officers.

Hegseth elsewhere discusses the defense industrial base and our inability to produce at scale. I have even written about that previously, and almost everyone in D.C. was writing about this in 2024 if they were close to or in national security. Again, this is a low bar. The United States produces about 30,000 artillery shells a month; we need to be able to make about 100,000 a day. We can’t. The military-industrial establishment has failed to deliver, and liberals and leftists also pointed this out. The bar was low: produce artillery shells. We could not and many said so.

But the tallow went in the rifles anyway and we did not make more artillery shells. 

Like Hegseth, JD Vance is also right about a few things. The thing he is most right about—and which earned him the title brutal American—is his treatment of Ukraine. Importantly for Applebaum, he is brutal in the minds of Europeans. I understand why. JD treats Europe badly because Europe treats Europeans brutally.

Passing almost without comment in the press in January 2025, the Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson went on the news, stating, “This is Sweden’s inherited problem. They have grown over a very long time. That we do not have control over the wave of violence is quite obvious.” Sweden was then grappling, and still is, with a terrible wave of grenade explosions and stabbings and shootings. In January, there was an explosion almost every single day. Sweden now has the highest rate of gun violence in Europe.

Almost entirely violence is being committed by 14–30-year-old second and third generation Muslim immigrants and foreign-born residents who, using international funds and on behalf of international gangs, have turned once-peaceful Stockholm into one of the most violent cities in Europe. This problem has now been going on for two years. As early as 2023, the Prime Minister had declared a loss of the monopoly of force and the collapse of Swedish state power. Integration of immigrants did not happen in Sweden. In fact, immigrants reproduced the kinship and clan ties of their homelands, like Kurdistan—which has been experiencing violence for decades—in Europe. As an example, “A prosecutor who was investigating one of the major crime networks in Sweden—led by people of Kurdish ethnic origin — was also the cousin of one of the network’s leaders.”[8]

The military in Sweden, a NATO member state, consists of less than 15,000 men. They are outnumbered 2:1, as the criminal organizations have a total of 30,000 members. Unable to stop the violence, as they have lost the monopoly of force, the state has called for social media censorship to prevent young men from being transnationally organized.[9] ISIS was defeated, yes, but the type of young man that joined ISIS in 2015 now finds himself simply joining a gang in Europe.

Because Sweden joined NATO in 2024, America is now committed to the defense of Sweden. Is this state, which cannot control force within its own territory, worth defending? In JD’s mind, the situation is even worse: the American security blanket allows states like Sweden, without internal monopoly of force, to rely on a foreign state for external protection, thereby enabling them to not invest in their own security, which prevents them from responding to internal threats.  

JD is brutal towards Europe because he loves Europe, and he hates what is being done to Europe, hates that American security has been turned towards the cause of the balkanization of European society. He hates that there is a European elite that has, from his perspective, used American subsidization of European security to avoid providing for internal security, leading to the immiseration of Europe as a whole, the weakening of European identity, and the total collapse of state power in certain parts of Europe.

Again, JD is right. I agree that this is a travesty. That European leadership has set a low bar, that the Sweden that we have promised to defend with American lives may not be worth defending after all, because Swedes don’t seem to believe Sweden is worth defending.

Brutality in this case is a return to the simple and foundational tasks of the state. The dual rejection of liberal pro-migration policies and the neo-conservative promise of NATO has given way to simple men asking simple questions to which the smart people have bad answers. How many brigades do you have? Do you control your own land? Do you have the monopoly of force?  What type of ammunition does the M4 rifle use? Is there tallow in the rifle?

When the state fails to provide internal security, men will rise who will instead. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed. Sandeman, Vance, Hegseth—call them brutal if you will—but don’t pretend that the men they are replacing weren’t putting tallow in the rifles.  The empire came home, and they came home to find the M4 stinking of fat and failure. Or as Hegseth said,

Antifa, BLM, now Hamas supporters and other progressive storm troopers have done their best to create little Samarras (the Iraqi town I was deployed in) in the center of cities like Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, and San Francisco. Places where police must respect the indigenous populations of street addicts and operate under a bizarre set of rules of engagement that effectively cede the territory (neighborhood) to the enemy (criminals).

The orphans of empire are not liberals or conservatives. They are men who fear that they have wasted their blood. Baltimore is not that bad, but the real point is that Baltimore should be much better. Baltimore and Stockholm should not have no-go zones.

Imagine something for me. What if your whole life was a quest to become a real person, with real pain and real stories, and you even bled for that, like ancient Lancelot in battle, but then you came home, and the round table was made of rotting wood, and the maidens hated your touch?

Vance and Hegseth are brutal. They are brutal because they are direct and simple. They do not care about faux niceties. Yet they are no more or less brutal than the society that made them. Ironically, what JD was most maligned for as “brutal” was not at all brutal relative to the acts of Bush Junior, or relative to the indifference with which Brussels treats Europe, or brutal relative to life on Kensington Street.

The Brutal Americans have been in charge for decades. Managing an empire demands brutality. JD Vance made the mistake of bringing some of that brutality home, alongside men like Hegseth, because they see Baltimore as no different from Fallujah. So, like they did abroad, like Hegseth did as a counter-insurgency instructor, they use whatever means necessary to restore order. Like Sandeman, that sometimes means sipping tea in the camp of the enemy tribe, and that may also mean collective punishment, even the punishment of innocent men, to set an example.

Empire brutalizes Americans. Empire isolates us from the world, deforms us. Empire also protects us. An empire is not an easy thing to destroy or to evolve. At a certain point, the management of the Empire can even escape those who created the empire and their liberal dreams of universal enlightenment.

Hegseth wrote in The War on Warriors,

…in 2008—in one of my first television appearances ever—I was on CNN’s Larry King Live and debated former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark about the war in Iraq. I was supporting the surge; he was against it. I was an Army first lieutenant; he was a retired four-star general and former NATO commander. Who allowed that matchup? I hope someone on the Supreme Allied Commander’s staff got an earful! The general’s understanding of his role in the Army was revealing, then and now. General Clark said, “We had a million troops in Vietnam, 550,000 Americans, almost 500,000 from the Republic of Vietnam army. Plus, another million in uniform that were part of the local militia. And the more troops, the more casualties. Secondly, if you complain about the quality of the government, you’re never going to solve this problem. We got rid of the government in Vietnam. We changed it, we still had problems. And to the end we complained that there was too much corruption. My response to him that night was clear, but restrained: “With all due respect, General, you have taken off your ‘general hat,’ and put on a ‘political hat.’ The generals are not supposed to be politicians. The general’s job is to fight and win the war when given the guidance from the commander in chief.”

In 2008 everyone knew that Iraq and Afghanistan needed more soldiers and, rationally, everyone opposed sending more. The wars were terrible mistakes. Controlling one, let alone both countries, meant deploying a million men. At the time, no one wanted that—except for Pete Hegseth, because that was the cost of victory. Hegseth believes that a general saying that a million men is too high a cost and that these lives would not buy victory anyway was excessively political. Ironically enough, that same exact line would become the MAGA line on Afghanistan shortly after.

Hegseth, in The War on Warriors, spends an entire chapter railing against the revolving door of the military-industrial complex. When asked by Senator Warren whether he would commit to not joining the defense industry after his service, he refused.

They are men that were cultivated because of their chameleon capacity to change and to deploy strategies as needed for victory. They have deep convictions about the world, deep enough to know that an affair here or there, a betrayal maybe, is nothing—because the road to victory is longer and greater than any one person. They thrive because of that. And yet, they are doomed to fail because the road to the “Golden Age” is a road paved by simple men, who have a simple view of the world, who will make the same simple mistakes as the complicated, moral men they are replacing.

Lawrence Wong, Singapore’s Prime Minister has said, “What the US is doing is not reform. They are rejecting the very system it created.”[10]  Vance and Hegseth are inheriting the world’s largest and most powerful, though somewhat outdated, military. They are inheriting 900 bases around the world. At the end of the day, there are still American soldiers in Berlin. There have been since the end of WWII and there will be at the end of the Trump presidency. To bring the troops home and to draw down the bases would be to end the empire.

JD, Trump, and Hegseth did not create this system. In fact, they hate this system. They do not want to inherit this system because, to quote Tucker Carlson, “The current state of Great Britian does not look to me like a country that won a war.” And yet they will inherit this system, inhabit this system, because they cannot build an alternative. To do so, one would have to be much more than a simple brutal man. One would have to embrace total global collapse.

One of the funnier parts of MAGA over the past two years, especially after the right-wing turn of figures like Tulsi and Rogan, has been the way that the right has tried to imbibe critiques of what the left has called for decades “neoliberal hegemony.” “Based” Senator Mike Lee and others like yoga instructor Representative Greene have been railing over the years against what they call “collusion amongst elites.” Sometimes, JD Vance talks like he’s an avid reader of Noam Chomsky. Hegseth rails against the military-industrial complex, and yet, now they are all in charge.

The reality is that the fundamental structures of American military hegemony will remain in place. That is, simply, the aircraft carrier fleet, the 900 offshore bases, the nuclear triad, and our defense pacts, like NATO. The brutal, simple men know that these are the fundamental structures of security. Thus, they are important leverage. They also know altering this system is beyond them because this is all that is keeping the world together. That is a simple and brutal fact.

Now, running on abandoning this duty, speaking like you’ll abandon this duty—that has all been done before. Sandeman was winning hearts and minds, not conquering territory; JD and Hegseth are leading us towards the Golden Age, not stewarding the empire as many have before. The brutal men are always characters, they have charisma—they rise because of this.

The formula for making a brutal person in a civilized society is easy. Rule a foreign people, fail in your efforts, and let the men who are left over simply be themselves. They will know your great intellectual debates are pretense for the same, even when there are real stakes.

They will know that brutality is a law more ancient than any made by man. They will know that you too are brutal; that the Eloi of the world, like Anne Applebaum, have no cleaner hands than them. They will know what separates the Anne Applebaums from the Pete Hegseths is one degree of power. Anne, after all, was in lockstep with Pete Hegseth about Iraq.[11]

The tragedy of the brutal American is that they are no more brutal than the people that made them, and no more capable. They are brute, more than brutal, reduced to simplistic thinking that is incapable of solving modern problems. They are men among the ruins, too driven by resentment and righteousness to build a kingdom of their own. The problem in their mind is wholly misunderstood, stupid, and simplistic. America’s problems are not the result of “cultural Marxists” or “DEIA.” They are far bigger and deeper, as I’ve written in the Years of the Dark Garden. They know this—a bit—but are too friendly with money power to go beyond the party line.

They rose to power because the elite system was failing to perform its most fundamental task: the security of the state. Simple men, who do not care about moral grandstanding, who know that at the end of the day, the state is nothing more than that which is force, rise, because the complicated men have forgotten that fact. They rise because the complicated men, men like Elphinstone, Kissinger—you can name another dozen luminaries—began to forget. They forgot about the border, they forgot about the rifles, they forgot about the men at arms, they forgot about the iron fist—but the simple man remembers.  

Yet, they too are men who forget. They forget that you fire boys like Edward Coristine, not because you are bending the knee to liberal blackmail, but perhaps because your party won an election with an astounding multiracial coalition, and hiring men with clear racist beliefs is not good to keep that coalition together, no matter what Bannon says to Stephen A. One is in the government, one is not.

They forget that, for example, we have due process so that our social discussion of whether Andry Hernandez Romero should be in prison or not does not happen in the public square, but in a courtroom, because in the public square there was once a hangman’s noose.

They forget that we have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because there was once a Great Recession.

So totally captured are they by a simplistic story where the deep state is a dragon and they are a knight that they forget that the man who talks about dragons most, Mr. Peterson, is known today for irrational weeping on national television.

They forget, like Hegseth, that Milley’s overreaction was because he is rationally afraid of civil strife in America. That is not a stupid belief. There are reasons to fear the Republic’s long-term unity. In the eyes of history, Milley will look a fool for DEIA, and wise for his fears; Hegseth will look wise for ending DEIA and will be a fool for not being afraid enough. They will look wise to care about the migration crisis, and foolish for pointless expansionist rhetoric about Greenland.

Simple, brutal men, as much as those elites that they are replacing, make simple mistakes. They will put tallow in the rifles because they have discussed military strikes on Canada. And never expect anyone who has put tallow in the rifles to admit that they placed tallow in the rifles.

Guinevere

I chose to write about Pete Hegseth because he is the member of the Trump Cabinet that most fascinates me. Everything from his alcoholism to his abuse of women, to his service and promotion to Secretary of Defense, intrigues me. That he is Secretary of Defense is almost beyond belief. Pete Hegseth’s story is a story of survival, of survival against both deserved and underdeserved foes and foes he brought upon himself.  The redemption arc, the alcoholism, the womanizing and the sexism; the logical, simple questions that the complicated people, good Americans and good Swedes, can’t answer.  Whether Pete lasts as Secretary of Defense or not does not really matter at all because his story is just one story amongst the bigger story of the brutal American, the orphan of empire, and there are many of those men in America today. When one Pete falls, another rises.

And they, someday too, like the elites they have replaced, will place tallow in the rifle. There is nothing for empire beyond hearts and minds, nothing beyond bullets soaked in fat. There is no other choice. Say that this is fate, say this is in the tea leaves, say this is doom-driven: they will make a mistake. They, likely, will make their mistake on purpose, placing cartridges in animal fat for cruelty alone.

Do not mistake any part of this article as anything like condemnation or celebration. This is to be read like you might read a recipe for bread. Vance and Hegseth, like Sandeman, are products of ingredients and a process. They are the orphan children of more brutal people who failed to perform simple tasks of the state.

Pete is a man on a quest. He wants to enter his home justified. In pursuit of that goal, he has made himself a warrior. If one were to believe him, throughout his quest he has fallen into sin before and risen back towards righteousness. If one were to believe Pete, because he has bled on his quest, he has passed beyond question. He has become justified. Yet this will also be his downfall.

Because that is not the American way. It has never been, and I do not believe him. The Brutal Americans are not Lancelot or Warriors, they are not Bill the Butcher, they are not dark knights, full of honor and redemption. They are men desperately searching for something that will make them strong, and they have risen to power because the moral men that these brutal men have replaced failed.

Weakness is the belief that because complicated moral people put tallow in the rifles, that anything else is justified; weakness is trading the men who put tallow in the rifles for Enlightenment for men who put tallow in the rifles for cruelty. Weakness is hating war and weaker still is loving war. Weakness is a quest for meaning through blood. And weakness is, in Pete’s chosen epigraph to The War on Warriors,

Proclaim this among the nations:

Consecrate for war;

    stir up the mighty men.

Let all the men of war draw near;  

  let them come up.

Beat your plowshares into swords,  

  and your pruning hooks into spears;   

 let the weak say, “I am a warrior.”

—JOEL 3: 9–10 (ESV)

Footnotes

[1] Tripadvisor. (n.d.). THE 10 BEST Things to do in Forest Lake (2025). https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g43077-Activities-Forest_Lake_Minnesota.html

[2] Choosing ethnic identity. (n.d.). Wiley.com. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Choosing+Ethnic+Identity-p-9780745622767

[3] Pete Hegseth Bronze star for Valor. (n.d.). DocumentCloud. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4423305-Pete-Hegseth-Bronze-Star-for-Valor/

[4] Mayer, J. (2024, December 2). Pete Hegseth’s secret history. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[5] LaFraniere, S., & Tate, J. (2024, December 6). Pete Hegseth’s mother accused her son of mistreating women for years. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/pete-hegseth-mother-email.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

[6] Applebaum, A. (2025, March 11). Trump and Vance shattered Europe’s illusions about America. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/trump-and-vance-shattered-europes-illusions-about-america/681925/

[7] Army to meet 2025 recruiting goals in dramatic turnaround, denies ‘wokeness’ is factor. (2025, January 17). PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/army-to-meet-2025-recruiting-goals-in-dramatic-turnaround-denies-wokeness-is-factor

[8] Modern Diplomacy. (2023, October 15). Sweden: A State on the brink of implosion. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/10/15/sweden-a-state-on-the-brink-of-implosion/

[9] Ai. (2025, January 31). Swedish Prime Minister: “Doesn’t have control over the wave of violence.” European Newsroom. https://europeannewsroom.com/swedish-prime-minister-doesnt-have-control-over-the-wave-of-violence-2/

[10] Singapore PM on Trump tariffs: US is “rejecting the very system it created.” (n.d.). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_1rFA7fCOTE

[11] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/18/2206628/-The-Atlantic-s-Anne-Applebaum-told-us-what-Saddam-Hussein-was-thinking-She-was-tragically-wrong