This drunken sot and serial sexual harasser, Pete Hegseth, was appointed Secretary of Defense by a president who doesn’t give a damn about competence. Hegseth recently banned transgender people from serving in the military, and is starting to make noises against any non-heterosexual people, and is now going on a triumphal tour of military bases around the world.
Military families protesting the Defense Department’s anti-DEI push heckled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on his arrival at United States European Command headquarters in Germany on Tuesday.
On a visit to the U.S. military’s key European military hub in Stuttgart, Hegseth was booed by around two dozen people who live at the base in an apparent demonstration against the policies currently being implemented by the Trump administration.
The demonstrators at the short protest repeatedly chanted “DEI,” apparently in a reference to the recent ban Hegseth has placed on some books in defense department schools. Hegseth last week ordered the restriction of learning materials covering subjects that included psychology and immigration in DOD schools.
Is anyone else ironically amused by the fact that all these regressive people have been whining that DEI is weakening the country and corrupting governing agencies and universities, but now it turns out that the anti-DEI fanaticism is the force tearing everything apart? All you had to do was accept that some women have penises and some men can get pregnant, and there was absolutely no problem and we could all get along, but now that they’ve acquired a taste of power the heterosexual purity brigade is using their obsession to do harm. They need to realize that they’ll get the tolerance they’re willing to give.
I’m sure Trump’s people are pouring over any photos of protestors, trying to put faces to names, so that the proper punishments will be doled out to any disloyal personnel.
The anti-DEI fascism has almost nothing to do with Trans people.
They are a powerless, very small minority already marginalized at 0.5% of the population.
The real targets are women, who are a minority that is actually the majority of the population at 50.5%.
Nonwhites who make up 42% of the population.
Nonxians, who make 35% of the population.
And especially Democrats and Progressives who make up roughly 50% of the population.
The US military is over half nonwhites and women.
I’m sure the fascists are going to try to change that as soon as they can.
That Georgian Crusader-cross tattoo of his is just a bad joke. It’s phony Christian macho bigotry all the way down.
Trump recently appointed Paula White-Cain to lead the White House Faith Office.
“Most recently White’s critics are circulating a preaching video in which she claims she was, in a vision, taken to the “throne room of heaven,” where she saw God’s face, though it was apparently cloudy and obscured. There she received a new “mantle” of authority or divine blessing.”
Great Bouncing Cthuhul! How America has degenerated!
My only hope is that liberals are waking up to the reality of the threat that faces us. If they don’t, if they keep pretending that the republican party is anything other than a fascist death cult then there really is no hope.
https://www.the-reframe.com/youve-persuaded-us-already/
Ken Ham and Franklin Graham are speaking along with Hegseth at this event in late April:
https://www.dayspringchristian.com/remember-america/speaker-series/
Josh Marshall:
* He also misspelled bureaucracy.
* 1/10 SFG=1st Battalion in the 10th Army Special Forces Group (Airborne).
Too funny. Booed at EUCOM HQ. I went to overseas DOD high schools, graduated from Munich American HS, and later was stationed at a Stuttgart base for two years. The booers were family and dependents. People back here probably don’t understand that some of these people may have been living in Germany for years. They’ve likely picked up some decidedly secular liberal, European views. After a while, you just don’t see American culture the same way again. I had real hard culture shock when I returned. I can’t say I ever really shook the feeling of alienness about life in the USA. Make no mistake, this is a very weird country. And, it’s just gotten weirder over the last decade.
John Watts – I think the big difference with the US is that the US believes in belief. That is why part of it, has a large problem with Science. Because is based on scepticism not belief.
Meanwhile, back at thw White House Faith Office.
“Most recently White’s critics are circulating a preaching video in which she claims she was, in a vision, taken to the “throne room of heaven,” where she saw God’s face, though it was apparently cloudy and obscured. There she received a new “mantle” of authority or divine blessing.”
https://juicyecumenism.com/2020/02/25/paula-whites-controversies/
Oh, ick!
As I see it, the big difference is belief alright… but not religiosity as such; more “manifest destiny”, “greatest country ever”, “freest country ever”, rah rah rah. The religiosity is kinda perverted by that framing.
(Obs, that’s just my personal opinion)
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Anyway, heckling is a pretty puny deterrent.
I much prefer DEI to DUI, to make a dumb pun.
@SQB
and it won’t be long until IUD is outlawed.
@10
In Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the slave catcher Ridgeway peels away the euphemism “Manifest Destiny” to reveal the implicit core belief contained within: “…if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.”
I think The Bible™ frowns upon tattooing.
@3 You mean his crooked swastika? Pretty funny for someone who is so fanatical about being “straight”…
devnll: “You mean his crooked swastika?”
Are there any that aren’t crooked?
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Sometimes, trying to gild the lily is pretty silly.
@14 The Torah does. The Torah is the first 5 books of the Old Testament–Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers & Deuteronomy. I think it’s Leviticus that has all the prohibitions and gotcha phrases.
The New Testament says nothing about tattooing. You’d think all the fundies and evangelicals would know that by now.
What would Jesus do? Apparently not have a hissy fit over a tattoo. Teens take notice.
@12 Well the red states are already trying to outlaw mifepristone, so sure, the IUD is undoubtedly on the hit list.
Maternal mortality has already spiked in TX from their abortion ban. Infant mortality too.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-ban-deaths-pregnant-women-sb8-analysis-rcna171631
Doesn’t look like they’re doing a particularly good job of saving the mothers.
Or the kids.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/25/texas-abortion-ban-infant-mortality/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/08/27/arkansas-maternal-mortality-rate-abortion-ban/
But AR is pushing hard tor the top spot on the “state that kills the most mothers” list
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/11/26/texas-committee-wont-examine-maternal-deaths-first-years-after-abortion-ban/
“Every sperm is sacred”
[Leviticus 19:28, silvrhalide]
The Tanakh has been co-opted by Christians, and they include it along with their fanfic they call the . There is the original Bible (the Jewish one) and the reboot that is the Christian one.
(A true smorgasbord of intolerances from which to choose and pick, yay!)
@19
Yep, and its chock full of cases of, “Huh.. Why the F do we need 4-5 words for this, lets just replace them with one.” Kind of lik the whole “heaven and hell” thing. There are at least 4 different words, which referred to literal physical locations in the ancient world, and where used as “examples”, for morality purposes, not as, “magic places that exist in the after life”. Heck, the Jewish after life didn’t even contain a “heaven”, their version was more like in where souls ended up in Pullman’s Dark Materials series (due though, in the case of his story, because fake angels and gods had gummed up the works of the reincarnation system) – a dark, dreary, place, where nothing happens. This is why the OT states that you have received any and all reward in life, and should not expect anything more in death. But, some group started asking, “Why would god be so cruel and unjust? Surely he must have some sort of plan.”, and instead of jumping to the sensible conclusion that he wasn’t real, and moving on, they went, “Heh, I know, he must be going to reward us in the after life!”, and twisted all those places into “hell” (you won’t find Gehenna, for example, in the KJV), and made up heaven. Problem solved – all the good people get “rewarded”, despite them never removing the bit saying that no such reward exists, and all the bad people get punished, thus establishing the ancient world’s version of, “If you hurt me, I hurt you back, but worse”, “justice”.
But, yeah, its not like, if they had kept the old one it still wouldn’t contain a crap ton of horror, for those that need an excuse to hate and hurt people. It just wouldn’t include the utterly stupid idea that god would reward you with paradise for doing it, and hurt all the bad people forever for apposing you.
As previously mentioned, that symbol of the tattoo and the text Deus Vult in Gothic font is associated with tiki torch enthusiasts.
I am not at all surprised he treats women badly. The fun part is, two separate veteran organisations dumped him for mismanaging their economy. The military-industrial complex will make him pay up for underperforming overpriced junk until the Pentagon is knee-deep in trebuchets and baseball bats.
The military industrial complex still pays a company to make billions of dollars of scrap, in the form of an out of date machine, all of which get shipped out to a field, to rot, because parts of said complex is corrupt, and only cares that the company in question a) only makes those useless machines, and b) refuses to innovate/change what they make, so they are not wasting tax payer money. Does the military itself want, need, or use any of these things? No, and they have repeatedly told the fed that they don’t want, need, or use them. There is, unfortunately, a massive difference between the “industrial complex”, and the actual military, and the only thing that have idiots like this in charge does (along with the anti-DEI BS, etc.) does is demote and remove people inside the actual military that would appose stupid ideas, and replace them with people that actually agree with the “military industrial complex”, i.e., the politicians and greedy corporations involved in directing its overall vision, and supplying it with materials.
So, yeah, not sure how “underperformance” is going to matter a damn bit. Turns out, if WWIII starts it may not be because someone else got nukes, but because the US military was turned, by these idiots, into as big a train wreck as the Russian one was under Putin, and we just decide to use nukes, because we find ourselves unable to defeat a country the size of Rode Island, or something, with our new and glorious “anti-woke” military. Yeah, unlikely in the short term, but if this stupid shit goes on long enough… even now we don’t seem to give a F about over priced junk, so how long before underperformance doesn’t matter either, because the people promoted in the military as leaders are similar idiots (and its not like the days of Nam, where my dad told anecdotes of morons leading squads somehow, mysteriously, not making it back to camp, after they pissed off the people under them)? We now have forensics, and the only people likely to get by such would be the scumbags, who covered up the death of a good leader, who they discovered was gay, or maybe a liberal, or some other now “undersirable” thing.