Women's Rights

We know the Fox News personality Trump nominated to run the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is a creep who abuses women. Heck, his own mother said so, as Anne Laurie covered in a recent post. In case you missed it, Penelope Hegseth emailed the following comments to her son (source is the NYT):

“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.

She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

She took it all back when contacted by the Times for comment and claimed Hegseth is a good husband and father. That’s the mother’s version of a horndog politician’s wife standing stoically next to her man during a press conference called to address a gross sex scandal.

Women are routinely expected to endure this sort of humiliation to preserve men’s hold on power. There’s no payoff for them, of course. Just ask Hillary Clinton.

I thought maybe that would change eventually, but we’re going backward in this country on women’s equality. An adjudicated rapist will put his tiny hand on a bible soon and be restored to the highest office in the land. The parade of sex offenders around the sex pest in chief is a big FUCK YOU to women, whether they acknowledge it or not (and many do not).

But the Hegseth nomination is also a giant FUCK YOU to basic competence, as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer revealed in an article published yesterday. I suppose it’s paywalled, but here’s a link. Excerpts below:

…Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

To sum up, Hegseth is a blackout drunk who sexually harassed female employees and tolerated the same behavior from other members of his team. He’s an accused rapist and alleged bigot. That would normally be a problem for the potential leader of the DoD, but “norm” flew out the window a long time ago. However, Hegseth’s incompetence is disqualifying even if the character issue is moot these days:

Margaret Hoover, a Republican political commentator and political strategist who worked as an adviser to V.F.F. between 2008 and 2010, recently told CNN that she had grave concerns about Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon, the largest department in the federal government, given his mismanagement at V.F.F. “I watched him run an organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors. The organization ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.” Hoover stressed that V.F.F. was an exceedingly small organization, with fewer than ten employees, and a budget of between five million and ten million dollars. She told CNN, “And he couldn’t do that properly, I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-seven-billion-dollar budget and three million individuals.”

Good question, Ms. Hoover.

One amusing aspect of this disgraceful mess: Hegseth allegedly lied to the Trump people and said no skeletons would tumble out of his closet if he were nominated, so they were “blindsided” when the rape accusation and payoff surfaced.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s transition team was blindsided by the sexual-assault story because Hegseth had failed to disclose anything about it, including the fact that he had paid off his accuser. He also failed to disclose that he had received a copy of the police report in 2021, long before the Monterey police’s recent release of it. The series of damning revelations has reportedly infuriated the transition team. “When we ask, ‘Is there anything else we need to know about?’ that is usually a good time to mention a police report,” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone. “Obviously he remembered that this all happened and there is no way—I don’t think—he could have believed this wouldn’t come out once he got nominated.”

Well, maybe Hegseth is yet another scumbag following the corporate ethos of an organization led by Donald J. Trump, so he felt no need to disclose anything. If the boss can sexually assault and defame women with impunity and be reelected, why should Hegseth see his own sordid history as an obstacle to an important job?

The truth is, a critical mass in this country despises women and scoffs at basic standards of competence — or else is so indifferent that it amounts to the same thing. That’s not a hot take; it’s been cooling on the windowsill like a rancid pie for decades.

Open thread.

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