It seems to me that Pete Hegseth should be court-martialed for his actions in the Pentagon, breaking both international law and U.S. law that governs the behavior of our military. Any association with killing prisoners who have surrendered, shooting survivors of a boat that’s been attacked in wartime is an act of criminality.
Amongst other things, I am the proud father of a United States Marine. My liberal friends were shocked. When my son volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1999, and then after 9/11 was sent to war in Afghanistan at the beginning of that war, where he did two tours of duty and then one in Iraq. I happened to disagree with the war in Iraq, even though I knew George W. Bush personally. Later, when my son John and I wrote a book that became a bestseller, called Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps.
I got several personal handwritten notes from both the older President Bush and his wife, Barbara, and the younger President Bush in the White House. The First Lady read a section of my book that actually had appeared in the Washington Post as an opinion piece about my pride in my son’s service on Meet the Press, and the book became a bestseller. My association with the Marine Corps grew, and I was invited down to 8th and I, the Marine Corps headquarters in Washington. I spoke at various Marine Corps birthday balls.
I got to know two commandants of the Marine Corps, and when I researched several follow-up books on the Marine Corps, I stayed near Parris Island and spent days and nights there with carte blanche access because of the appreciation for keeping faith from Marines. In fact, I was told by one recruiter that it had become a sort of a handbook in all recruiting stations to hand nervous parents of those about to engage in the Marine Corps, especially parents like me, who were from parts of the country and or families that had not served and did not have that traditional service ethic. That book went on to become a bestseller, and I got to know a lot of Marines, including drill instructors on Parris Island who drummed into their recruits that part of being an honorable Marine was to obey the laws of war.
You did not shoot prisoners. You did not shoot survivors after battles. You did not torture. You did not kill. You did not rape. You took no pleasure in killing. There was an ethic and an honor that went with being a Marine.
Fast forward to the Secretary of Defense that Donald Trump has put in the Pentagon and the dishonor that has come to our military through this man. Through breaking international law and ordering and or being part of the chain of command that killed people clinging to an upturned boat. Serving under a president who, by the way, is a draft dodger and comes from my generation of people from the Vietnam era and dodged the draft by claiming bone spurs. A vice president who was a Marine, JD Vance, who has turned his back on the honor of the military by defending Pete Hegseth and, in fact, Donald Trump, because JD Vance is chasing power rather than legitimacy as an American leader.
How is it possible that someone like Pete Hegseth has not been court-martialed for this action? How is it possible that the honorable men and women in the United States military and the Marine Corps and other services are being subjected to the dishonor of these stories?
I’ll tell you why it’s possible.
It’s possible because of the brutalization of the American public. The evangelical families that support Donald Trump as a sort of gift from God to solve their problems with secular culture, with liberals, with Democrats and others.
Overlook the brutality of the Trump regime;
Girls dragged from their fathers, three-year-olds dragged down the street, mothers dragged by their hair by ICE agents. We’ve gotten used to a lot of things that seem very un-American and would have shocked former generations, even of conservatives. Imagine George W. Bush or his father, President Bush, or any other American leaders putting up with this sort of nonsense from a Department of Defense, or it’s now called Department of War. What a ridiculous idea that we glorify war to the point we renamed the department. How can this be? Well, it happens because we have brutalized ourselves, particularly the evangelical community has brutalized itself with decades of parenting books that hold up spanking, corporal punishment, slapping. Teaching parents to ignore the tears and pleading of young children being beaten with wooden spoons for sale in the gift shop of various evangelical churches as a discipline measure.
Children being groomed to brutality through brutality. This has gone on for generations ever since an old friend of mine, who was a friend at the time, wrote a book, Dare to Discipline. And started a trend in parenting books that expanded by thousands because there’s good money in the “God Cash” in the community of frightened evangelical parents buying these books. I was part of that movement in the 1970s and the 1980s, and I fled.
But when I look at the acceptance of the level of brutality carried on by ICE agents…
When I look at the acceptance of the love of violence and military intervention that put at risk innocent National Guard troops in Washington, who were then killed brutally…
For no reason other than the president wanted to play politics with the men and women in uniform.
And that this level of degradation of the military is put up with by evangelical voters, 83 percent of whom voted for Trump. Brings us to the brutality of Pete Hegseth and the fact that a man who in any other administration would have been fired and then court-martialed for breaking the laws of war. War is brutal, but it would be even more brutal without certain conventions. In exactly the way that Vladimir Putin is doing the same thing, shooting prisoners, torturing people in his war with Ukraine, where Donald Trump, in his worship of brutality and violence, has changed sides, and is now siding with Vladimir Putin against the Ukrainian people that had the support, widespread support of the American people, including evangelical Christians who have voted for Trump, but who go along with the brutality against the Ukrainians by siding with Vladimir Putin, by siding with Pete Hegseth, by siding with the idea that there are no laws of wars, that when Vladimir Putin murders children in… nursery schools with deliberately targeted drone attacks. When his soldiers routinely have raped, raped and raped again and again and again across Ukraine as they invaded that. Somehow, we turn a blind eye to this in the same way we turn a blind eye to the brutality of the head of the Saudi regime as he murdered an American-based journalist.
And we pretend it didn’t happen.
And we accept all these things in the same way we accept this illegitimate Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, and his brutality and his worship of violence at arm’s length.
How did we get here?
We got here because the evangelical community itself worships violence when it comes to spanking children, when it comes to corporal punishment, when it comes to capital punishment, when it comes to turning a blind eye to the plight of the least fortunate as they are dragged out of bakeries and off ladders painting houses, and out of people’s gardens when they’re doing work, and off fields where they are picking strawberries and herded into vans, ironically, most of them being Hispanic evangelical and Pentecostal Christians or Roman Catholics.
And you would think that the white nationalist, evangelical Christian nationalist group would welcome these additions to Christian America as opposed to, say, the Islamic “invasion of Europe” as they see it in places like London where their southern borders in Europe are basically Islamic countries, and our southern borders are from the point of view of evangelicals, Christian brothers and sisters.
But they’re not interested in true Christian nationalism or a majority of Christians. Or they would welcome immigrants south of our border who are Christians, but instead they are brutal racists, and it’s the color of skin they want deported.
And so we make a bed and we roll around in that bed with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who orders as many as 80 executions a day. Minor drug runners that are caught from Egypt, harmless, defenseless people. And we do the same thing here now, loading innocent people onto airplanes to send them to god-forsaken countries, where they are tortured and put in prisons.
And we turn a blind eye and we say, oh, well, oh, well, oh, well, God sent us Donald Trump. Did he?
Did God send us Pete Hegseth to break every international convention of war? Did he?
The drill instructors on Parris Island taught a different kind of honor to young Marines when my son was there. They taught a different kind of honor when I visited them and watched them training and sat. With them as they trained young Marines in their duty to not only die for America, but to fight for America in a way that brought honor to the Marine Corps, not the sort of dishonor that you have when helpless men are in the water clinging to an upturned boat and you order a second strike. We have become a brutal country.
And it is time to rethink our support for brutality, whether it is our support for spanking children, even though they cry out for mercy and we ignore it, thinking we are saving them somehow by brutalizing them. Well, that generation grew up and voted for Donald Trump.
That generation thinks that it’s cool that Pete Hegseth has white supremacist mottos tattooed on his body and worships death.
This is not America. This is not American. This is Russian.
This is Putin-esque. It’s the same mentality that sees no harm in bombing daycare centers and maternity wards in Ukraine to steal land as we now change sides and give in. As the proud father of a Marine, it makes me sad that our men and women are so dishonored by this quality of leadership.
