The Dark Satire of Pete Hegseth’s Quantico Speech

Perhaps Dr. Strangelove—the greatest satire that ever was—comes closest to capturing what transpired in Quantico on September 30. “God willing,” says Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the madman responsible for thrusting the world into its nuclear demise. “We will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all.”

That line kept returning to me as I watched the newly minted Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the Princeton Tory shock jock turned gung-ho infantryman turned disgraced right-wing nonprofiteer turned interchangeable Fox News dunce and reckless axe thrower turned sexual-assault-allegation collector turned pretend Very Serious Statesman. Citing Jesus on the Golden Rule (“do unto others that which you would have done unto yourself”) to a room full of generals during a decadent empire’s decline does not, in itself, constitute dark comedy. It’s that such a fallen, flailing specimen as Pete Brian Hegseth invoking the sacred instruction rivals Stanley Kubrick at his peak.

Unlike Ripper, Hegseth never spoke of the purity and essence of our natural fluids, but his speech stank of the same, self-emasculating fear. Much of the diatribe centered on the secretary’s obsession with restoring what he called a “gender-neutral age-normed male standard.” For him, this means no more tolerating the “beardos.” That is, the Sikhs, Muslims, or Jews who have been allowed waivers for religious purposes. As well as Black Americans who have been similarly waived due to a medical condition that makes regular shaves unbearable.

At times the secretary’s prissiness appeared in earnest, and I believe he’s convinced himself that part of the reason the United States lost Kabul is because too many troops had facial hair. But it’s impossible not to wonder if he also has more nefarious motives. Right before declaring a military without “Nordic pagans,” Hegseth noted without explanation the glaring exception of the Special Forces who get to continue basking in their undisciplined ways. If scruffiness and military competence are at odds, how can the military’s most competent soldiers be so stubbly? Or is the secretary looking to select for traits other than competence? Nor did he explain how his go-to examples for manly warfighters, from the Spartans to the Crusaders, get a pass. They weren’t exactly the clean-shaven types—though they weren’t Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, or Black Americans either.

Contradictions abound in the life and times of Pete Hegseth. An inordinate portion of his harangue focused on fat troops, fat generals, and fat admirals. He waxed romantic on the return of accountability, merit, and high standards. On the need to reject foolish leaders for qualified and capable ones: “We just have to be honest. We have to say with our mouths what we see with our eyes, to just tell it like it is in plain English, to point out the obvious things right in front of us. That’s what leaders must do. We cannot go another day without directly addressing the plank in our own eye, without addressing the problems in our own commands and in our own formations.”

Then the Jesus-quoting, hypocrisy-denouncing secretary welcomed to the stage Donald J. Trump.

These contradictions gesture at something more sinister. And for all their “plain English” talk, men like Hegseth often lapse into euphemism. Amid his putative calls for restorative discipline and standards, our self-anointed redeemer demanded a curious set of relaxations: “No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more sidetracking careers. No more walking on eggshells. Of course, being a racist has been illegal in our formation since 1948. The same goes for sexual harassment. Both are wrong and illegal. Those kinds of infractions will be ruthlessly enforced. But telling someone to shave or get a haircut or to get in shape or to fix their uniform or to show up on time, to work hard, that’s exactly the kind of discrimination we want.”

Again, it’s conceivable the niminy-piminy secretary just really likes proper grooming and fit men. But as someone with a long track record of being accused of making bigoted statements and abusing women, including by close colleagues and family members, it would be nice if Hegseth would—in this instance—tell it like it is: He’s not calling for discipline but domination, and of the sort he’s been getting away with for years.

Likewise for the secretary’s pronouncement that “stupid rules of engagement” are now over. Hegseth was too coy to tell us which specific rules would no longer be enforced, but his recent announcement that the butchers at Wounded Knee would retain their Medals of Honor speaks for itself. So does his part in convincing Trump to pardon or grant clemency to the war criminals Clint Lorance, who ordered his men to fire on unarmed Afghans; Mathew L. Golsteyn, who executed a captive; and Eddie Gallagher, who stabbed a teen prisoner to death and posed with the body. Or his cheering on of Trump’s threat to pull a page from the Taliban playbook and destroy Iran’s heritage sites. Taken together, Hegseth’s plea for discipline collapses into its opposite—a demand for wanton violence and mayhem.

For the naïve listener, Hegseth might come across as a bona fide if cranky traditionalist. This is surely what he’s betting on. In making his case for returning the “Department of Woke” to the Department of War, he insisted he’s just having us go back to the good ol’ days of Gen. George Marshall and War Secretary Henry Stimson. Trump expressed a related sentiment amid his ramblings when he invoked the legacies of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz, and Curtis LeMay. Later, the president summoned the “unyielding power of [Gen. George] Patton, [Gen. Omar] Bradley, and the great Gen. Douglas MacArthur.”

None of these men were leftists. Most were some variety of conservative, and they all ended their careers with tremendous blood on their hands. But what’s most notable about this list is its disharmony. For one, the greater number of these figures despised one another. Diehard racists and jingoes like Jackson, Patton, MacArthur, and LeMay throw the relative cosmopolitanism of the others in stark relief. Grant abhorred the Confederacy and stood in solidarity with Radical Republicans and Black Reconstructionists. Marshall was at home with New Deal liberals and opposed escalating tensions with China, the founding of Israel (which he warned would turn the Middle East into an intergenerational firestorm), and the Dutch invasion of Indonesia that accompanied the end of World War II. Eisenhower affirmed the New Deal compromise, furthered the cause of civil rights, and railed against what he coined the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower, along with Nimitz, deplored the use of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and both became critics of the nuclear arms race. Furthermore, these leaders welcomed the very postwar, international order—from the United Nations to international law—that the current administration is now set on destroying.

Gen. Omar Bradley once warned, “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.” It’s hard to imagine a more fitting description of Hegseth’s worldview. Much has been written about Hegseth’s tattoo that reads “Deus Vult,” a Latin phrase that translates as “God wills it.” The phrase functioned as a battle cry during the Crusades, and Christian nationalists have taken up the call. Hegseth himself has written a book called American Crusade, which praises the original item. So maybe he and his colleagues are traditionalists after all. But their tradition harks all the way back to Holy War, to the most emphatic exaltation of violence as virtue. “No one wants war here,” Hegseth told the crowd, “but we love peace—we love peace for our fellow citizens.” Yet the peace he describes is the peace of conquest, the quiet that follows ruin. It’s the kind of peace his commander in chief had in mind when he subsequently proposed turning our cities into “training grounds” for the military. Both speak of peace with the same bloody-mindedness as one of Kubrick’s most demented creations. A strange love indeed.