Pete Hegseth is repulsive. I have watched his performances before Congress. He is rude, brutish, and obnoxious, self righteous with a-little-dab-will-do-yah hair and tatoos to match. He's also a Princeton grad. The New York Review of Books for June 11th had a fascinating review of Hegseth's two books. I can't bring myself to read the books; my stomach can't handle it, but I am curious about how he came to be the way he is. Suzy Hansen has done the hard work for us. I recommend her essay.
Hansen provides a deeply unsettling autopsy of contemporary American political culture. Rather than treating Hegseth as an ideological aberration or an unfortunate glitch in the democratic machine, Hansen positions him as a mirror. He is a highly visible, explicitly distilled product of a historical continuum—one defined by exceptionalism, a preening appetite for domination, and an increasingly juvenile brand of brutishness.
He is heir to a tradition handed down from the Founders—not the noble,
revolutionary ones in the history books but the ruthless, ragged
genocidaires who went west. He practices that nasty Christianity. “Break
the teeth of the ungodly,” he said at the Pentagon prayer service; Bull
Connor comes to mind. So many of Trump’s men—Gregory Bovino, Markwayne
Mullin, Tom Homan—resemble the primeval thugs of the heartland, who
openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable.
Hegseth’s rapid ascent from right-wing campus provocateur to the apex of the world's most formidable military apparatus exposes a profound truth about modern America: when a society spends decades insulating itself from the human consequences of its violence, its leadership will eventually devolve into a caricature of raw, unchecked power. By investigating Hegseth’s juvenile brutishness and examining how elite institutions, media ecosystems, and bipartisan foreign policies laid the groundwork for his rise, we can better understand the urgent necessity of what Hansen calls a structural renunciation of the American war reflex.
To understand Pete Hegseth’s political theology, one must first confront the distinctly adolescent, locker-room quality of his aggression. Hansen observes that despite his elite education and proximity to power, Hegseth remains "a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school". He represents the high school bully operating on a global scale—the guy who "shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria" now handed the keys to the Pentagon.
This juvenile disposition is not merely a personality flaw; it is the vital engine of his prose, his politics, and his military strategy. Hansen notes that across Hegseth’s six books, his tone has "become steadily more juvenile, as if his mind were maturing in reverse". His public pronouncements lack the sober, heavy-hearted calculations historically simulated by architects of state violence. Instead, they gleam with the unrefined sadism of an action-movie script. Commenting on devastating air strikes, Hegseth proudly boasts: "We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly as it should be... We have only just begun to hunt". The choice of the word "hunt," alongside a compulsive habit of "recit[ing] weapon names," reduces the horrific, flesh-and-blood reality of modern warfare to a high-stakes video game or a safari.
This brutishness manifests as a complete rejection of restraint, international law, or basic human empathy. Hansen traces the origin of this worldview to Hegseth’s formative years as a soldier during the bloodiest chapters of the Iraq War. Disillusioned by lawyers, rules of engagement, and the rare accountability mechanisms designed to curb war crimes, Hegseth adopted a philosophy of "maximum lethality". In his view, the only acceptable approach to conflict is "the unshackling of soldiers from any rules of engagement so that they can kill with impunity". When cornered on the strategic failures of modern counterinsurgency, his response is revealingly simplistic: "This is war. This is conflict. This is bringing your enemy to their knees". It is a vision of total annihilation born from an inability to comprehend foreign societies as networks of living human beings. For Hegseth, a nation like Iran is not an ancient, richly complex civilization of real people; it is merely an abstract polygon on a target screen waiting to be obliterated by "death and destruction from the sky".
Hegseth’s adolescent cruelty is further supercharged by a highly selective, weaponized theological framework—what Hansen aptly brands "that nasty Christianity". Hegseth seamlessly fuses schoolyard bravado with a blood-drenched, Old Testament fanaticism, regularly invoking God and Jesus specifically to justify mass killing. In a chilling Christian prayer service held inside the Pentagon, he petitioned for "...overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.... We ask [this] with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ". This is a complete subversion of the gospel of grace, replacing the crucified Christ with a cosmic crusader who demands that believers "break the teeth of the ungodly".
By aligning his family with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches—a radical sect that advocates for the subordination of civil law to Old Testament dictates, capital punishment for homosexuality, and "rigidly patriarchal families"—Hegseth seeks divine validation for his terrestrial biases. The church’s worldview is starkly illuminated by its leader Doug Wilson’s hyper-masculine, colonial rhetoric: "A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts". This patriarchal hunger for conquest shapes Hegseth’s foreign policy into a fanatical brand of Christian Zionism, viewing military carnage in the Middle East as a necessary, prophetic prerequisite for the Second Coming. When guest preachers like Franklin Graham take the Pentagon podium to declare that "God also is a God of war" while quoting biblical commands to "utterly destroy all that they have... both man and woman, infant, nursing child," the boundary between state defense policy and genocidal religious crusade vanishes entirely.
Hansen does not paint Hegseth as an aberration who broke into the corridors of power from the margins of society. Instead, she illustrates how America's elite structures continuously accommodated, insulated, and elevated him. Hegseth’s trajectory is paved with the golden bricks of institutional privilege: he is a Princeton valedictorian, an Army National Guard major, and a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Even when his juvenile, destructive tendencies caught up with him in his professional and personal life, the system refused to discard him. When he grossly mismanaged the finances of veteran nonprofits—leaving half a million dollars of debt and frequently turning up so "intoxicated... as to need to be carried out of the organization's events"—there were no lasting systemic penalties. When he faced credible accusations of sexual assault, a confidential $50,000 payoff was enough to keep his trajectory clear. Shades of Kavanaugh, another who benefited from affirmative action for the rich.
Instead of facing exile, Hegseth was absorbed into Fox News, a corporate media apparatus where he could marinate in a "propagandistic and fame-hungry culture". On television, he perfected his persona, translating his inner ethical vacuum into prime-time ratings. His personal behavior—described in leaked emails by his own mother as that of a man who "belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego"—did not disqualify him from leading the world’s most lethal military entity. It served as an asset. In the MAGA universe, personal debasement is recast as authenticity. As Hegseth himself observed with striking candor, Donald Trump resonated because he "didn’t—and couldn’t—hide his personal failings," proving to a base eager for validation that "the reservoir of forgiveness is deep". For Hegseth, the Trumpian political arena offers the ultimate prize: absolute absolution without the inconvenience of genuine repentance.
Hansen’s most devastating critique is directed at the liberal establishment and the mainstream media, entities that present themselves as the "opposition" to Trumpian autocracy while quietly validating its violent underpinnings. Hansen argues that the difference between the political factions is not one of substance, but of style. As she notes, "The Biden people may not have exhibited that nasty Christianity, but they did exhibit that nasty hegemony". The current administration’s reckless warfare is the logical inheritance of a bipartisan consensus. It was Hillary Clinton, Hansen reminds us, who first popularized the word "obliterate" regarding Iran in 2008. Hegseth’s truculent, dismissive press briefings are merely unvarnished iterations of State Department briefings from the Biden years, where spokespeople "disdainfully waved away questions about the destruction of Gaza".
Whether the violence is masked by the feigned haplessness of technocratic Democrats or celebrated by the holy-war rhetoric of MAGA Republicans, the human toll remains identical. When the US-Israeli campaign hits 13,000 targets in six weeks—obliterating an entire family in Oshnavieh County with a Tomahawk missile or killing 175 children at a girls' school in Minab—the institutional response across the American political spectrum is a collective shrug. Corporate media outlets refrain from processing these horrors as crimes against humanity. Instead, they treat mass murder as a technical problem, running analytical headlines like The New York Times’ "Israel Keeps Killing Key Iranian Leaders. Will It Work?". By focusing their opposition strictly on procedural complaints—such as the Trump administration's failure to secure congressional approval—Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries reveal their fundamental alignment with the mechanics of empire. They cannot truly condemn the war because they share the underlying belief that American dominance must be preserved at any cost. They understand that the alternative, humiliation, is too painful to bear.
Suzy Hansen’s essay leaves us with an uncomfortable, urgent diagnostic challenge. Pete Hegseth is not a foreign body that infiltrated the American political organism; he is an authentic expression of its history. He is the heir to "the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west," a repository of the cold war, and the moral vacuum of the post-9/11 era. He represents an American culture "marked by a presumption of the right to use violence and a concurrent assumption of innocence".
The path forward cannot be found by simply waiting for the current administration to collapse or by retreating into comforting myths about the nation’s inherently noble institutions. It requires a profound, painful act of national renunciation. This means dismantling the sprawling security apparatuses, corporate media ecosystems, and deep-seated cultural myths that sustain the mass bombing reflex. To avert a slow slide into a failed, autocratic democracy, Americans must discard the juvenile craving for global supremacy. The nation must embrace a difficult truth: it is not exceptional, it is not uniquely righteous, and its people are merely "equal with the rest of the world before God". Until this structural reality is faced, the American system will continue to manufacture, validate, and empower brutal figures like Pete Hegseth. They are, after all, stamped with the defining seal of our collective heritage: Made in the USA.
Link to the original essay in which she reviews two books by Hegseth: American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free and In the Arena: Good Citizens, A Great Republic, and How One Speech can Reinvigorate America
