{"id":33929,"date":"2026-04-20T05:40:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T05:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/33929\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T05:40:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T05:40:26","slug":"pete-hegseths-panicky-angry-weirdly-religious-iran-war-briefing-was-painful-to-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/33929\/","title":{"rendered":"Pete Hegseth\u2019s panicky, angry, weirdly religious Iran war briefing was painful to watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m starting to feel sorry for Pete Hegseth. Week after week, the defense secretary turns up at 8 a.m. sharp to defend the latest disaster in the Iran war<\/a> \u2014 and week after week, he gets more angry about it, more visibly desperate, and more bizarrely religious.<\/p>\n

Hegseth is quite clearly a man who wants to cosplay as Captain America but instead keeps wandering onto the set of Joker. \u201cThis is not a fair fight,\u201d he said at the podium today<\/a>, supposedly directly addressing Iran. \u201cWe are locked and loaded\u2026 We\u2019d rather not have to do it\u2026 You don\u2019t have a Navy or real domain awareness! You can\u2019t control anything!\u201d<\/p>\n

If that weren\u2019t enough, he then dabbled in threatening war crimes again: Iran will have \u201cblockades and bombs falling on infrastructure, power and electricity\u201d if they don\u2019t sign a deal, he added. Truly, diplomacy at its finest.<\/p>\n

So far, none of this deviated from his usual rhetoric. But then Pete took a hard pivot \u2014 and began to address the press directly. \u201cSpeaking of choosing wisely,\u201d he said, having just implored Iran to \u201cchoose wisely\u201d lest they be bombed into submission, \u201ca note to the press of the press corp.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI just can\u2019t help but notice the endless stream of garbage,\u201d he continued, his voice speeding up. \u201cThe relentlessly negative coverage\u2026 Sometimes it\u2019s hard to figure out what side some of you are on. It\u2019s incredibly unpatriotic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Pete<\/p>\n

Pete Hegseth appeared to threaten journalists during a desperate Iran War press conference (Reuters)<\/p>\n

Pete was sitting in church with his family this Sunday, he said, when the pastor conveniently started talking about Chapter 3 of the book of Mark, and specifically the part where Jesus heals the sick on the Sabbath but the stickler Pharisees \u2014 \u201cthe so-called elites of their time\u201d \u2014 criticize him for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey came to see if he\u2019d heal them on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him,\u201d said Hegseth, a funny little smirk playing on his lips. The Pharisees, you see, were \u201conly looking for the negative.\u201d And as he sat there in church with his family, ruminating upon those lessons of the bible, Hegseth couldn\u2019t help but think: \u201cOur press are just like the Pharisees.\u201d These enemies of Jesus had the \u201chardened hearts of our press,\u201d who steadfastly refuse to \u201copen your eyes to the goodness.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to even know whether to laugh or cry at such blasphemous chaos, just as it\u2019s hard to know how to respond to an AI-generated image of Trump depicted as Jesus<\/a>, which is then swiftly deleted and replaced with another AI-generated image of Trump<\/a> being hugged by Jesus.<\/p>\n

But the look on Pete\u2019s face as he delivered this asinine attempt at rhetoric was genuinely worrying. The man who insists on calling himself Secretary of War instead of Secretary of Defense \u2014 a Christian move if ever there were one, whatever that silly, non-MAGA Pope thinks<\/a> \u2014 had a curiously vacant expression. His words were absurd and his delivery was flat. It was an unsettling combination.<\/p>\n

There was another, jerky pivot into how great military recruitment numbers are (\u201cWhere are the reports on that?… The surge of Americans wanting to join the greatest military in the world?!\u201d) Then he bludgeoned the Pharisees point again, in case anyone had missed the analogy: \u201cThe American people, with goodness in their hearts, see past the Pharisees in the press.\u201d Finally, he promised that the US military would \u201cstay aggressive\u201d and that the \u201cWar Department is locked and loaded.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, yes: a holy war! Just what the people voted for, in the name of AI Jesus, amen.<\/p>\n

\"Hegseth<\/p>\n

Hegseth has used his press conference to highlight military success against Iran – and blast the media for its coverage of the conflict (Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Hegseth then opened the floor to questions, and used them as an opportunity to play around with his favorite themes: America\u2019s allies are meanies and bad for not following them into the war; America is very, very strong and excellent and winning all the time; Donald Trump is the greatest deal-maker in the world and that label isn\u2019t contingent on whether or not he can actually make deals.<\/p>\n

Pete\u2019s defense mechanism is logical fallacies, and they were out in force today. At this point, what else does he have?<\/p>\n

Then he walked right into a trap that may or may not have been set deliberately. A reporter in the room asked his opinion about Iran\u2019s latest propaganda video: an AI graphic showing Jesus casting Donald Trump into the fires of hell.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as a video like that, that\u2019s disgusting and detached from reality,\u201d the Secretary of War, a man with no sense of irony, responded.<\/p>\n

Poor Pete. He doesn\u2019t deserve our Christian sympathy, but still: Poor Pete.<\/p>\n

A man called upon to defend the indefensible; to apply biblical passages to a useless, unpopular war and a failing ceasefire and now even to the journalists reporting on it; a man who\u2019s in way, way too deep and only knows how to scream that he doesn\u2019t need rescuing and he isn\u2019t in the water anyway. A man whose leader put up not one but two images of himself as a holy icon over the past few days, not long after calling Iran \u201cyou crazy bastards\u201d and adding \u201cpraise be to Allah.\u201d<\/a> A man who thought the best way to paper over all of this was to invoke the tale of the Pharisees, which is supposed to warn against calling good things evil and evil things good, and also to warn about the dangers of acting in bad faith. A man who thought it was a good idea to spend a press conference stretching out an analogy where reporters are the Pharisees and Donald Trump is, once again, Jesus.<\/p>\n

But sometimes you don\u2019t need a cherry-picked passage from the Book of Mark or a star-spangled image generated by an algorithm. Sometimes the lessons are simpler and more straightforward, and staring you right in the face. Lessons like: a truly popular government doesn\u2019t need to shout about how popular it would be from a podium every day, if everyone just stopped criticizing it. And a truly popular war doesn\u2019t require a press conference warning people not to talk about the negatives any longer, specifically to \u201cchoose wisely\u201d when they think about what to write.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lesson the Trump administration really could have learned from the Iranian regime a long time ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019m starting to feel sorry for Pete Hegseth. Week after week, the defense secretary turns up at 8…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[120],"tags":[34,18,21047,7590,74],"class_list":["post-33929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pete-hegseth","tag-iran","tag-pete-hegseth","tag-pharisees","tag-press-conference","tag-trump"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116435433730103527","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}