Hegseth's Tattoo
Occasionally I write something and a year or two or three I bring it up again. Three weeks ago I wrote a piece called All You Have To Fear Is Fear Itself about Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. That’d make Hegseth the top brass in the military structure – just below Trump, the Commander In Chief.
Since then all three or four news outlets that I roam around in every morning have carried a story everyday about either Hegseth’s treatment of women or his struggle with alcohol or both. Both are issues that warrant a lot of thought and scrutiny. As the person at the helm of the world’s most powerful armed forces… the person that the Commander In Chief, with his volatile finger on the nuclear button will presumable turn to in a moment of crisis, the Secretary of Defense should be a person completely above reproach. Character actually matters.
But remember his other controversy? In all of the hub bub about his womanizing and drinking, I’ve heard no further mention of his White Supremacist tattoo. It seems like that would matter too. A lot. I have a couple of tattoos. They both say USMC and neither matter. Hegseth’s White supremacist tattoo matters. So, here I am…bringing it up again.
The Civil Conversations Project is fundamentally about America’s Thing With Race, and in case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal had a lengthy story a couple days ago about Pete Hegseth. It’s an interesting read. Hegseth, now a former member of the Washington DC National Guard, was pulled from the security detail for the Biden inauguration and labeled an ‘insider threat’ for sporting a White Supremacist tattoo. Hegseth is now Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense. Since the incident Hegseth has said that he “No longer wants this army.” So it appears that our next Secretary of Defense is going to be a White supremacist who never rose higher than major, and who hates the army he is going to oversee.
Trump and Hegseth have both accused the military of caring more about being “woke” than being in top fighting shape, as though the two are mutually incompatible. The term “woke” as used by the MAGA crowd is meant to denigrate and belittle those who seek fairness and respect among all Americans, a fundamental America value that seems to grate on the nerves of the MAGA’s just as it did on the Tea Party, the pre-cursor to MAGA. In fact, Joint Chief of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, who Trump said on his Truth Social network in response to an authorized call that Milley made to his Chinese counterpart, that Milley should be, “put to DEATH!” Caps his, not mine.
What did General Miley say that put him so completely on Trump’s bad side? Responding to a question by Rep. Mike Waltz about the appropriateness of a seminar at the United States Military Academy at West Point called “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage,” Milley responded: “I want to understand White rage. I’m White. And I want to understand it.”
Tying the question to the January 6 insurrection, Milley asked: “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. I want to maintain an open mind here.”
Milley called it “offensive” that service members were being called quote, ‘woke’ or something else, because we’re studying some theories that are out there. I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”
All of this is just a good example of how upset racists get at anything that smacks of giving Black and Brown people the slightest leg up, even just an attempt to be understood.