War and Rumors of War

What is Pete Hegseth Up To?

Happy Friday! Special edition coming to you early because when 800 top military brass are summoned to Quantico from across the planet on short notice for a mysterious meeting, we’re not waiting until Tuesday to figure out what fresh hell is brewing.

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Here at the Freakshow we, like everyone else, are wondering what is up with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s unprecedented command. Guesses range from an anti-woke pep talk to finally ridding the services of Blacks and females to the commencement of World War III.

Of course the idea of a former Fox News anchor and recovered alcoholic running a world war is imaginable only in a film where Mike Judge remakes Dr. Strangelove as farce, as the last laugh on our Idiocratized nation. But weirder things are happening in Trumpworld every day.

To get some clue, we called Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). Weinstein’s rock-ribbed conservative bonafides include graduating from the Air Force Academy and serving as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, but he’s been standing against Christian extremism in the military for decades. Through his anonymous members in the services, he has outed much Onward Christian Soldier batshittery, from the infamous “Jesus loves nukes” talks at Vandenburg air base to the “Jesus rifles” our warfighters were handed to use in Afghanistan, engraved by a Michigan defense contractor with New Testament quotations.

Ever since the Senate confirmed Hegseth, a Christian-symbol-tatted dry drunk whose pastor believes women shouldn’t vote, Weinstein’s tip line has been on fire. Here’s our conversation, edited for space.

Freakshow: What do you hear about this all-hands summons to Quantico?

Weinstein: It looks like it’s 800 admirals and generals. I started getting calls immediately. The first concern is the enormous administrative burden and logistical burden and cost to the taxpayer of having these senior people from all around the world on such short notice. Everyone’s very confused. Second: How many TV shows or movies have the plot where you get all senior people in one place, as a huge potential target and threat. And then the fear is what we’ve been reporting since February of this year: Since it’s only a 60 minute meeting, the fear is that these senior folks will be required to take a loyalty oath, both verbally and sign something. And in America, we do not take an oath in the military to any individual like Trump. We take an oath to the Constitution.

Freakshow: Those purity tests were in the Project 2025.

Weinstein: That’s their Mein Kampf 2025. Now it’s Gilead from the Handmaid’s Tale. Today, to be approved for service, you need to have a penis and you need to be a straight white Christian man.

Freakshow: Yes, Hegseth is really doubling down, he shut down the women’s advisory committee at the Pentagon this week too.

Weinstein: The situation reminds me of an incident my first or second day at the Air Force Academy. I and the class of ‘77 are all huddled together in Arnold Hall, the huge social area. In walks this luminescent figure, this ethereal figure, a brigadier general, Vandenberg Jr. His father retired as a four star. The Vandenberg Air Force Base is named after him. We were an all-male class, the first women didn’t come until the class of ‘80. We’re 17, 18, 19 year olds, and he says, “I want you all to understand I will never allow women to come to this academy.” He said it’s a well-known fact that if you put a woman in a cockpit of an aircraft, particularly a fighter aircraft, because of the vibrations that occur particularly in a dogfight, they will create excitement in their vaginas. The clitoris will go out of control and they will lose situational awareness. And situational awareness is the most important thing for a pilot.

We’re buying it because like, wow, he’s a general. Then we learned about this famous Russian female fighter pilot in World War II, a story that was required knowledge for us. I remember thinking at the time, Well, how is it that Lydia Litvyak did not lose situational awareness? But that’s where we were with the misogyny then. It’s even worse now.

Freakshow: Wow. No words.

Weinstein: Right now morale is gone. Mid-level officers are trying to get ahead, clawing over everybody’s back by turning in more senior officers for being woke, supporting women, supporting Black people, supporting people of color, supporting Jews, supporting Muslims, supporting the Constitution. The law is very simple. It’s the separation of church and state. The compelling governmental interest is to maximize the lethality of our U.S. military to protect the full panoply of constitutional protections for the rest of our populace. And that means we must maximize good order, morale, discipline, and unit cohesion, mission accomplishment, and the health and safety of the troops. And what has happened with MAGA and Hegseth is the exact opposite of that. I get calls around the clock. We have almost 100,000 clients now, hundreds more each month. Ninety-five percent of them are already practitioners of the Christian faith, but they’re being tortured and abused and terrorized for not being Christian enough.

Freakshow: How are they being terrorized?

Weinstein: Once a month now in the Pentagon, Kegseth [sic, Weinstein occasionally used the popular nickname] has his Jesus praise service in the morning, in the largest auditorium, filled with people in uniform. If you don’t show up, you are noticed. Started in May. One member called and told us his commander said to the lower ranking commander, “What are you doing to propagate the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the ranks?” An hour or two after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Kegseth stood in front of a bunch of troops and had them bow their heads and said the Lord’s Prayer, praising Jesus Christ as a remembrance to his very dear friend, Charlie Kirk.

Freakshow: In the wake of Charlie Kirk assassination they’re starting to talk about going after oppositional organizations. Are you concerned that they’ll try to mess with your organization?

Weinstein: They already have. In late June of 2023, a little over two years ago, we found out MAGA members inserted wording into the National Defense Authorization Act to make it a felony under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for anyone in the military to reach out to us by name. We had to work with Democrats on the Senate side to get that out in conference. They’ve never done that to even the ACLU or Planned Parenthood. So they have already tried. Of course, we know they’re going to do that.

This situation reminds me of a conversation I had a while ago with a Japanese reporter who came to talk to me years ago. In history, in world history, whenever a radicalized version of any religious faith merges with the power of the state, particularly that part that wages war, we do not end up with little ponds, creeks, and streams — we end up with oceans and oceans of blood. Anyway this reporter from Japan said, we are looking at what’s happening in America and your fight, the fight that you’re doing. And he said, we lost control in our own country. Radicalized Shintoism merged with our state in the 1930s. And we invaded China and we bombed Pearl Harbor. We see it happening in your country now, but it’s not Shintoism, it is Christianity.