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On Fox, Pete Hegseth Wanted More Wars -- And More War Crimes

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, making it abundantly clear that this will be round two of the revolving door between Fox News and Trump’s administration.

During his tenure as a Fox host, Hegseth endorsed a “preemptive strike” against North Korea, voiced support for American soldiers committing war crimes, smeared veterans applying for government benefits as “dependent,” said January 6 rioters “love freedom,” and repeatedly railed against a supposedly “woke” military.

Hegseth demonstrated his influence over Trump in 2019 by aggressively lobbying — both on-air and privately — for Trump to intercede in the cases of various accused or convicted war criminals, resulting in multiple pardons and the removal of former U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer.

Hegseth has a record on foreign policy and national security of advocating for aggressive military action and championing war crimes
- Hegseth: “There's merit in a preemptive strike” against North Korea. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/11/17]
- Hegseth defended Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians: “They're making tough calls on the battlefield.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 8/11/19]
- Hegseth dismissed a whistleblower’s account of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “One man’s whistleblower is another man’s political leaker who has an agenda.” [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 9/26/19]
- In opposition to then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Hegseth repeatedly advocated that Trump intervene and pardon convicted war criminals. Trump ultimately followed Hegseth’s urging. [Media Matters, 11/8/19, 11/15/19]
- Months after then-President Trump withdrew support from Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, Hegseth declared that America can still work with allies “like the Kurds.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/3/20]
- Hegseth suggested targeting Iran's energy production sites: “Do they want their economic sites, their military sites, political sites and/or cultural sites targeted? How about their oil and gas?” [Fox Business, Varney & Co.,1/6/20]
- Hegseth said he supports America committing war crimes: “I don't care about Iranian cultural sites.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/6/20]
- Hegseth called for massive strikes against Iran to take out infrastructure and possibly cultural sites. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/8/20]
- Hegseth: Democrats and the media “are the agents of Russia. Not Donald Trump.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/21/20]
- Hegseth attacked the International Criminal Court: “These international bodies can turn and can turn against you.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 3/6/20]
- Hegseth on reports of a lack of White House response to Russian bounties for killing U.S. troops: “You can make a decision to do nothing too.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 6/28/20]
- Hegseth suggested that former President Barack Obama played a role in instigating the war in Ukraine. [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 8/26/23]
- Hegseth suggested that “signals have been sent” to Iran by the Biden and Obama administrations that it can fund terrorism. “You see our administration working very hard to say, ‘Oh the $6 billion, it’s not in their bank account yet.’ There may be technicalities about that. As you pointed out, it’s all fungible. But you also have the Obama administration giving away cash to the Iranians, multiple times. And then you got the easing of sanctions and lightening of the restrictions against Iran under the Biden administration,” Hegseth said. [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 10/8/23]

Hegseth has advocated against veterans' benefits
- Hegseth, along with co-host Brian Kilmeade, criticized American veterans who apply for all the government benefits they qualify for, calling them “dependent.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 4/5/19]
- Hegseth called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) a “mindless moron” after she resisted calls to privatize the Department of Veterans Affairs: “She is a moron — I'm going to say it. No, especially on this issue, she is a mindless moron who knows nothing of this topic.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 4/23/19]
- Hegseth worked with the for-profit college industry against protections for student veterans. [Media Matters, 6/26/19]

Hegseth has complained that the military is too “woke” and focused on diversity
- Hegseth said that “we've seen the woke ideology make its way into the military” and that it’s unfortunate that “so many of our Pentagon brass have … bought into these ideas.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 3/28/21]
- Hegseth claimed that “instead of training, our leaders are focused on turning our troops woke.” A chyron during this segment read “Air Force implements a woke ‘safe space.’” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 4/19/22]
- Hegseth chastised the Army for recognizing Pride Month when the agency’s birthday is also in June. “It's sort of the perfect end state of what the left would like,” said Hegseth. “You are an individual automaton that we will celebrate.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 6/2/24]
- Hegseth: “The Pentagon likes to say our diversity is our strength. What a bunch of garbage.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 6/3/24]
- Hegseth argued that “DEI” in the “woke” military makes it “less equipped to fight the wars it needs to fight.” Hegseth commented, “It's one thing to have DEI inside your corporation or inside your university; it’s a whole other thing to have it inside the 101st Airborne.” [Fox News, The Five, 6/3/24]
- Hegseth said the military needs “a new commander in chief that’s going to get rid of all of this CRT, DEI nonsense, all the gender nonsense.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 6/4/24]
- Hegseth complained about “a generation of guys” in the military “who have been filtered out for multiple reasons because of political ideologies at the top,” including “genderism, DEI, CRT, whatever it is.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 6/14/24]
- Hegseth claimed that “patriots” don't want to serve. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/7/24]

Hegseth has railed at the idea of women in combat
- Hegseth claimed the military was at “a crisis moment” because of “social justice prerogatives” in the military such as “women in combat.” [FlashPoint via Victory Channel’s YouTube page, 6/4/24]
- Hegseth promoted his new book by denigrating women in the military: “The book is not just about me — it's the social justice, politically correct issues being pushed from Obama and Biden appointees that generals are allowed to happen, from women in combat lowering standards, to CRT and DEI, to trans in the military.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 6/5/24]
- Hegseth complained that Obama’s secretary of the Navy had dismissed a Marine Corps study “that proved women should not be in combat units.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 6/7/24]
- Hegseth: “I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.” Hegseth then suggested institutions not “incentivize” women in “places where traditionally — not traditionally, over human history — men in those positions are more capable.” [Shawn Ryan Show, 11/10/24]

Hegseth has supported nativist immigration policy and attacked migrants
- Hegseth defended separation of immigrant children from parents because the kids get food and “soccer and video games.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 6/17/18]
- Hegseth: Border patrol work is “much like being in combat sometimes.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 4/22/19]
- Hegseth: “Who's been dehumanized? It's been the ICE agents and the Border Patrol agents.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 7/19/19]
- Hegseth dismissed concerns about crying children left without parents by ICE raids. “The left will always call them ‘raids,'” he said. “They [ICE] say, ‘Hey these are just worksite enforcement.'” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/12/19]
- Hegseth defended Trump's “public charge” rule restricting legal immigration for those who might use public benefits as a “common sense measure.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/13/19; NPR, 8/12/19]
- Hegseth: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is what “unchecked illegal immigration and massive waves of refugees look like without assimilation.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 5/4/21]
- Hegseth attacked pregnant migrants: “Anchor babies will soon be here to keep them in the U.S.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 9/21/21]
- After Fox correspondent Bill Melugin said there have been migrants entering the U.S. from countries he “had to Google” because he’d “never heard of them before” and reported that “the Chinese numbers, they’re up over 900% right now,” Hegseth mused that “it’s almost like we don’t have a country.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 3/26/23]
- Hegseth promoted a hoax about homeless veterans being displaced to make room for asylum-seekers. [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 5/13/23; AP News, 5/19/23]
- Hegseth claimed an expanded humanitarian parole program is a “secret program that’s flying illegal immigrants into our country where they just skip the border.” Hegseth continued, “We hop the border for them. … What are the implications of this? How much do they vet them in the home country?” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 3/5/24; FactCheck.org, 3/14/24]
- Hegseth complained that the federal government is “distracted” at the border because the focus has been on “mostly peaceful protesters on January 6.” [Fox News, One Nation with Brian Kilmeade, 3/16/24]
- Hegseth likened Trump’s plan for mass deportations to President Dwight Eisenhower’s removal of millions of immigrants in the 1950s, noting that “it was very controversial because some of them were here legally.” “That’ll be the challenge in this one [Trump’s deportation plan] too. Because people will say, ‘Well they claimed asylum, so they have a legal claim,’” Hegseth said, adding, “They’re going to have to be real tough to deal with this illegality.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 3/17/24]
- Hegseth said, “When you import the Third World, you get Third World hierarchy, values, and chaos.” He continued, “Your quality of life is going down. You feel less safe. Your resources are being drained. ... But don't speak up about that. If you do, you're the racist.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 10/11/24]

Hegseth supported insurrectionists and refused to admit Trump lost the 2020 election
- Hegseth: “Republicans will keep losing” if they don’t make it more difficult to vote. [Fox News, Hannity, 11/13/20]
- Hegseth thanked a former congressional candidate for “keeping up the fight” to get mail-in ballots thrown out. [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 11/29/20]
- Hegseth defended the January 6 insurrectionists: “They love freedom.” Hegseth continued, “You don't have to believe the election was stolen to know that the system has begun to undercut people who love our country.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/7/21]
- When pressed by guest James Talarico to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, Hegseth demurred: “I’m not – don’t really feel any obligation to answer anything.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 7/13/21]
- Five days after the 2022 election, Hegseth cast doubt on why ballots were still being counted in Arizona, mentioned that then-Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs “is in charge of the elections there,” and said, “We don’t know whether people are cheating or not.” Hegseth lamented the rate of ballot counting in Arizona, stating, “You want to see a threat to democracy? It’s what we’re watching in Arizona right now.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 11/13/22]

Hegseth has made virulent anti-Muslim remarks
- In a segment about Hamtramck, Michigan, which has a Muslim majority, Hegseth pushed fears about the “assimilation” and “integration” of Muslims. [Media Matters, 2/3/16]
- Hegseth criticized former Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges for giving her state of the city address at a mosque. He stated: “This is the left doing everything they can to fall over themselves to fawn over a new community.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/17/17]
- Hegseth said France is experiencing “a slow motion 9/11” and a “demographic invasion” because “Muslims are having 2.6 kids, whereas French-born folks are having 1.6 kids.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 5/13/18]
- Hegseth: Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) “has a Hamas agenda.” [Fox News, Hannity, 7/29/19]
- In response to U.S. troop withdrawal, Hegseth called Afghans “illiterate poppy farmers." [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 7/14/21]
- In his 2020 book, Hegseth complained about “Muslims’ birth rates” and praised “crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes.” [Media Matters, 11/12/24]
- Hegseth supported far-right conspiracy theorist and anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer’s failed 2020 congressional campaign. [Media Matters, 11/12/24]

Hegseth has mocked the threats from climate change
- Hegseth urged Trump to “take credit for solving global warming” because of cold temperatures from a “bomb cyclone.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 1/7/18]
- Hegseth: “Democrats are more obsessed with climate change” than talking “about the problem of radical Islam.” Hegseth made the comments during one of Fox's “straight news” programs, claiming Democrats are “obsessed with climate change as a religion. They refuse to talk about the problem of radical Islam. And as a result it's infiltrating institutions.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 3/20/19]
- Hegseth said addressing climate change is the left's “religion” and “they want to fight the weather.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/13/19]
- Hegseth claimed that climate activists want to “fight the weather.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/22/21]
- Hegseth suggested that climate activists attempting to mitigate climate change are “wanting to play God.” Hegseth said: “This goes back to people wanting to play God. Climate has happened for thousands and thousands of years.” [Media Matters, 12/11/23]
- Hegseth mocked reports of record-breaking heat and blamed media for “hyping climate insanity.” “One thing the mindless left loves to magically discover every year, it’s that summer is hot,” he said. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/7/23]

Miscellaneous
- Hegseth: Democrats skipping the AIPAC convention “are at some level anti-Israel or maybe antisemitic.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 3/22/19]
- Hegseth blamed “gun-free zones” for deaths in the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/5/19]
- Hegseth donated to a candidate who killed someone in a drunk driving crash. [Media Matters, 5/31/22]
- Hegseth blamed crime on a “culture of criminality” that he said arose after the protests over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police in 2020, and he lamented that it will take “a very long time to rebuild the perception or the morale of” law enforcement. [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 8/28/22]
- Hegseth praised vigilantism against crime. “Who is there to protect us? There are some cases that take on a life of their own. They become emblematic of a situation in the city. Marine veteran Daniel Penny is precisely that.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 5/21/23]
- Hegseth participated in a smear campaign against a Pentagon official in charge of mitigating white supremacy. [Media Matters, 5/25/23]
- Hegseth falsely claimed Kamala Harris wants to “get rid of red meat.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 7/27/24; Yahoo! News, 8/1/24]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Paul Krugman Warns Trump Voters Are About To Get 'Brutally Scammed'

Although Paul Krugman retired from his New York Times column after almost 25 years, the liberal economist is still keeping busy and making media appearances — including an interview with The New Republic's Greg Sargent posted on January 14.

Trump aggressively campaigned on the economy last year. But Krugman, during an appearance on The New Republic's podcast, laid out a variety of reasons why he believes Trump voters will suffer economically after he returns to the White House.

Krugman told host Sargent, "A lot of people are going to get brutally scammed. Those are his most fervent supporters…. Probably the local business elites are the most fervent MAGA types out there — more so even than the working class, but that doesn't mean that Trump cares about their interests. Small businesspeople are the people that he's, all through his life, hired as contractors and then not (paid), right? Scamming people like that is what his whole life has been (about)."

Small businesses and consumers, the economist warned, will suffer the consequences if Trump follows through on the aggressive tariffs and mass deportations he is proposing.

"Trump has really radical policy ideas," Krugman told Sargent. "I obviously think they're terrible, but they are radical. He wants Smoot-Hawley-level tariffs. He wants mass deportations. He wants to take away the independence of the Federal Reserve. How do you justify all of that when we're pretty much a Goldilocks economy?"

Trump hammered President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris relentlessly over inflation during his 2024 campaign, but Krugman warned that the tariffs Trump is proposing will be quiet inflationary.

The economist told Sargent, "If we take the totality of stuff that Trump seems to want to do — he wants to raise tariffs but cut taxes on high incomes — it's basically working-class voters (who) are going to face higher prices and upper-income voters (who) are going to benefit from tax cuts. This really is very much contrary to their interests, then you add in all the other stuff. Even more than usual for a Republican, he appears to have an extremely regressive economic program in mind — one that really will effectively redistribute income away from working-class voters to the top."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Amid Propaganda Firestorm, Mainstream Media Privileges Trump's Lies

The right-wing propaganda machine’s opportunistic and unhinged response to the wildfires sweeping the Los Angeles area provide an instructive but foreboding look at what the next four years could look like.

Firestorms have swept parts of Los Angeles Country and its environs since last Tuesday, as a “perfect storm” of dry conditions (spurred in part by human-caused climate change) and winds gusting over 80 miles per hour sparked apocalyptic conflagrations and severely hampered firefighters’ response.

While the fires are not uniquely large, the fact that they are burning in a densely populated area has resulted in staggering costs — at least ten people are reported dead as of Friday morning, tens of thousands have fled their homes, and more than 9,000 structures are damaged or destroyed, with economic loss estimates in the tens of billions of dollars.

Political leaders would ideally respond to such horrific circumstances by putting aside partisan differences and standing together to help the victims rebuild. But something very different is happening this week in right-wing spaces.

President-elect Donald Trump is lying a lot in order to blame his political opponents for the fire. The president-elect's Truth Social feed this week is alternating between memes highlighting his purported plans to take over Canada and Greenland and falsehood-heavy rants about how “the gross incompetence and mismanagement” of President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are responsible for the fire.

Trump’s MAGA media allies are aiding his effort by turning the right-wing information ecosystem into an unrelenting wave of bogus attacks related to the fires. When any major story breaks, the top priority for the hosts on Fox News, Trumpist social media influencers, and the rest of the echo chamber is to identify scapegoats for their audiences to rage against.

As destruction spreads across Southern California, they are chiming in with a familiar cast of enemies: Democrats, environmentalists, and diversity. These claims have in turn fueled attacks on media outlets for debunking right-wing falsehoods, as well as demands that Trump threaten to hold back desperately needed assistance to the region once he takes office later this month.

None of this is going to inform right-wing audiences about the unfolding disaster, much less reduce the risk that another one strikes in the future. But that’s not the point. The commentariat knows that their audiences are united in their hatred of the left, and by providing the usual villains, they keep viewers, listeners, and readers engaged for their movement’s political gain.

As SoCal burns, the right finds false scapegoats

Responding to natural disasters is a core function of government, and leaders’ response to such tragedies deserves careful scrutiny. But the evidence Trump and his allies are pointing to in order to claim that California’s fires stem from liberal mismanagement don’t hold up.

The main avenue the right has seized upon — blaming California Democrats and environmentalists for supposedly limiting the water supply used to fight the fire — is entirely false.

Trump alleged on Truth Social that there was “no water for fire hydrants” to fight the fire because “Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow” from northern to southern California because he wanted to protect populations of the delta smelt, a rare fish.

His right-wing propagandists quickly parroted his argument to their audiences. On OAN, Dan Ball claimed that “You liberal Democrats running that city, county, and the state have blood on your hands tonight,” before reading Trump’s post. On Fox, Jesse Watters claimed of Newsom that “there is no water coming out of the fire hydrant because this man mismanages the water there.” And Larry Kudlow said on his Fox Business show that the governor “cut the water flow that never got to Southern California, in defense of this obscure fish.”

But none of this is true.

It’s not a water shortage that is impeding the firefighting effort — Southern California’s reservoirs are full, and LA County officials say they filled “all available water storage facility tanks” before the fires started. Some water hydrants ran dry in the Palisades because the extraordinary high demand on the area’s tanks (“four times the normal demand of water was seen for 15 hours straight in the area of the fires”) depleted them faster and reduced the water pressure needed to replenish them.

The long-running dispute over protecting the smelt has nothing to do with the firefighting effort — beyond the fact that there wasn’t a water shortage, that dispute hinges on whether water resources should be used instead for farm irrigation in the South and Central Valley.

And the “water restoration declaration” doesn’t exist, according to Newsom’s staff.

The right regularly responds to disasters by fixating on efforts to hire a diverse workforce, and this case has proved no different. On social media, right-wing influencers targeted Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, claiming her leadership of the department shows that “DEI is quite literally getting people killed,” “DEI = DIE,” and “DEI has deadly consequences.”

Such attacks moved swiftly up the right-wing food chain. “This is the leadership of the LA Fire Department — I sure hope they know what they’re doing,” Fox star Jesse Watters said on Wednesday while shaking his head. He later claimed that “California is committing suicide before our very eyes. DEI is deadly.”

And at times, the discourse became nakedly conspiratorial with Fox personalities darkly alleging that “the homeless” or “outside agitators” were responsible for starting the fires and that the government was deliberately allowing them to burn unimpeded.

The right uses the same playbook after every disaster

The right treats every disaster as an opportunity to attack the left, with talking points bubbling up from the fever swamps or filtering down from Trump, then spreading swiftly through the ecosystem thanks to the all-encompassing nature of its propaganda machine.

We’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly over the last few years, following deadly natural disasters in North Carolina and Puerto Rico and California, among others.

But because this is such well-trodden territory, it is disturbing when legacy media outlets are unable or unwilling to bat down the false claims.

The New York Times’ write-up of Trump’s remarks about Newsom’s water management is headlined “Trump Blames California’s Governor, and His Water Policy, for Wildfires.” Only in its final paragraphs does the story explain that the Trump claims detailed in its opening sentences are false.

Privileging the lie like this leaves Times readers poorly informed. The good news for the paper is that another opportunity for better coverage will surely follow the next natural disaster.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump's Election Win Was Tiny -- So Stop Knuckling Under And Shake It Off

It's important in a democracy that the losing side grapple with its defeat and learn the right lessons for next time. A certain amount of reflection and self-criticism is healthy, but we've blown past that point and are in danger of over-interpreting the 2024 results. Despite headlines proclaiming the GOP won in a "rout" or declaring that "This is the collapse of the Democratic Party,"

November's election was actually quite close. Trump received 49.9 percdent to Kamala Harris's 48.4 percent, a difference of a point and a half. That's a smaller margin than any winner since Richard Nixon in 1968. The popular vote margin in 2000 was also razor-thin, but the candidate who received more votes that year was not the Electoral College winner. If the same percentage of Hispanic voters that chose Hillary Clinton in 2016 had voted Democratic in 2024, Harris would have been the victor. The Republicans took control of the Senate, but their margin in the House was reduced.

This is not to say that the Democrats don't have lessons to learn. It seems pretty obvious that shaking off the outsized influence of "the groups" — the immigration rights, LGBTQ rights, anti-development, anti-police agitators is a good place to start. By all means, Democrats should convene conclaves and discuss all of that with their pollsters and greybeards.

But in the meanwhile, Donald Trump did not suddenly become more normal or less of a threat to democratic norms and institutions than he was on Nov. 3. Yet a fog of obfuscation has settled on the country, one in which Democrats are offering peace pipes, withholding judgment on some of the wilder Trump Cabinet nominees, and focusing on areas in which the two parties can work together rather than the ones on which they differ. The papers have been filled with chirpy articles offering how Trump can really make a difference on housing policy or public health or our energy future.

If the Democrats have concluded, with Rep. Jared Moskowitz, that "we (Democrats) were to the left of the American people" on immigration, fine. And if Democrats want to pay lip service, with Rep. Ro Khanna, to the DOGE initiative (if it even is an initiative), OK, though it would be nice if they noted that other commissions have addressed the matter of government waste and deficit spending to zero effect. The Grace Commission in the 1980s and the Simpson-Bowles Commission in the 2010s made substantive proposals to Congress and the president.

But in order for anything to happen, Congress and the president must take their duties seriously and, just perhaps, enact laws. Instead, our elected leaders said thank you very much for your service and ignored them. In keeping with the unseriousness of MAGA, this DOGE (the title is an acronym for Department of Government Efficiency but also a reference to, what else, an internet meme) is not even a congressionally authorized investigation, far less a new government agency. It's a chimera, and even before Trump has taken the oath, Elon Musk is already retreating from the fantastical claim of cutting the budget by $2 trillion.

Democrats and others should focus a bit less on last November's election and a bit more on what Musk has become. Not content with threatening to primary any Republican who dares assert independence from Trump, Musk has gone abroad seeking fascist-adjacent leaders to support and promote. The man Trump has entrusted with vast influence has endorsed the German AfD, a Russia-philic, extremist right-wing party that cannot seem to stop using racist and antisemitic slogans; agitated against the British government by spreading lies, promoted the cause of right-wing provocateur Tommy Robinson, and announced, as it were ex cathedra, that Nigel Farage is no longer acceptable as the leader of the Reform UK party.

Where are the calls for Trump to repudiate Musk?

Perhaps people are feeling defeated. After all, Trump himself just gave a press conference in which he repeated Kremlin talking points (totally false) about the origins of the Ukraine war. It's perfectly reasonable for Democrats and others to conclude that Trump is aligned with Putin and with the fascists worldwide who adore him. Remember how he responded to news that Putin's tanks had rolled into Ukraine? He thought it was brilliant. Maybe he's trolling when he threatens to use force to retake the Panama Canal or, God help us, Canada.

But maybe his authoritarian juices are rising as inauguration day beckons. It's impossible to say at this moment, but what is possible to say is that most Americans do not perceive Trump to be a would-be Putin. They may be OK with him firing some bureaucrats and deporting some illegal aliens, but they didn't sign up for unabashed authoritarianism.

Or perhaps they did. But one thing is certain — we'll never know unless the opposition shakes off its torpor. If Democrats and tech barons and newspaper owners and columnists keep pretending that Trump is really interested in health reform or housing initiatives and continue to sweep the dangerous and fascist messages under the rug, there is zero chance that the American people will understand what is happening.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

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Hegseth has a record on foreign policy and national security of advocating for aggressive military action and championing war crimes

Hegseth has advocated against veterans' benefits

Hegseth has complained that the military is too “woke” and focused on diversity

Hegseth has railed at the idea of women in combat

Hegseth has supported nativist immigration policy and attacked migrants

Hegseth supported insurrectionists and refused to admit Trump lost the 2020 election

Hegseth has made virulent anti-Muslim remarks

Hegseth has mocked the threats from climate change

Miscellaneous