Tat? Black cowboy hat? Good to go.
“I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said, “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal [and] has made fighting more complicated.”
…President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guard soldier, for Secretary of Defense, is being met with disbelief and outrage among members of Congress and former military officers.
…Trump’s selection of Hegseth has also renewed scrutiny of his political and religious views, his advocacy for soldiers accused of war crimes, and his aggressive criticism of the military he would be leading. Many people with experience in defense and foreign policy fear that, if confirmed, Hegseth would politicize the officer corps.
…Hegseth has also spoken forcefully against the military’s efforts to address domestic extremism, which he labeled a “purge.” In the podcast interview, he said he had been removed from National Guard duty at President Joe Biden’s inauguration because he had been “deemed an extremist” by his leadership due to a tattoo on his chest.
…According to Hegseth’s account, the tattoo in question was identified by his superiors as “white nationalist.”
…”They are far-right Christian symbols that signal a very, very deep antipathy towards Islam,” said Matthew Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. “[Hegseth] literally wrote a book called ‘The American Crusade,’ drawing parallels between the Crusades and the present moment in the United States and Europe and pushing back on Muslim immigration to those areas.”
…A day after Hegseth was announced for the Cabinet position, Brooks Potteiger, a pastor within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) posted on X that Hegseth is a member of the church in good standing. The CREC, a denomination of Christian Reconstructionism, is considered by some academics to be an extremist, Christian supremacist movement.
“Their goal is to reestablish biblical law as the standard for society. So when they say they believe that America should be a Christian nation, they actually believe that all nations should be Christian,” said Julie Ingersoll, professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida.
…”This tradition is deeply patriarchal. Men are in charge, and women exist for the purpose of assisting their men in their exercise of dominion,” Ingersoll said. “Their roles are very limited to home and family. The goal is to have as many children as possible so the women are also otherwise occupied. But they don’t believe that women can or should really even work outside the home.”
Taylor said that recently, this form of Christianity has held particular appeal among some young men: the “theobros.”With the movement’s endorsement of heterosexual male dominance also comes a package of hostilities — toward LGBTQ identities, feminism and liberal democracy.
…But perhaps the most glaring challenge for Hegseth will be running the Pentagon, a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses 2.3 million troops and civilian workers, with an annual operating budget of some $900 billion.
“We’re talking about someone who is primarily known as a media figure who would be running really one of the largest institutions in the United States, who doesn’t appear to have any sort of managerial experience of that sort, and would be one of the most prominent figures in U.S. politics,” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University, who has long studied the interplay between media and the conservative movement.
“The job of Secretary of Defense should not be an entry-level position, and I question President-elect Trump’s choice of a television news host to take on this immensely important role,” House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in a statement.
“What’s behind defense secretary pick Hegseth’s war on ‘woke’”
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5191941/pete-hegseth-defense-department-dei
*Sexual Assault and Harassment in the Military
Connect the Dots 101 
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