{"id":61446,"date":"2026-05-07T20:52:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/61446\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T20:52:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:52:12","slug":"hegseths-war-on-pharisees-journalists-and-reality-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/61446\/","title":{"rendered":"Hegseth\u2019s War on Pharisees, Journalists, and Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur press is just like these Pharisees,\u201d Hegseth declared<\/a> during a press conference last month after recounting a sermon<\/a> he heard about some Pharisees criticizing Jesus in Mark 3 for healing a man\u2019s shriveled hand on the Sabbath.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe legacy, Trump-hating press: Your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors. The Pharisees scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative. The hardened hearts of our press are calibrated only to impugn,\u201d Hegseth added. \u201cI would ask you to open your eyes to the goodness, the historic success of our troops, the courage of this president, and this historic moment for a deal that could end the Iranian nuclear threat. The incredible battlefield victory laid before your eyes. The not one but two incredible rescue missions \u2014 miracles, you might say.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next day, Hegseth criticized reporting about the poor food quality aboard U.S. ships in the Middle East as false, though more reporting continues to document<\/a> with images concerns about the food. Writing on Elon Musk\u2019s X platform about the claims, Hegseth called<\/a> it \u201cmore FAKE NEWS from the Pharisee Press\u201d (which probably would\u2019ve been a good newspaper name back in the first century, along with the Sadducee Sentinel, Essene Enquirer, and Zealot Gazette).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth takes questions from the media during a press briefing at the Pentagon on April 16, 2026, during which he attacked journalists as \u201cPharisees.\u201d (Kevin Wolf\/Associated Press)<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks later, a Department of Defense account on X posted a graphic from a rightwing organization claiming that on major media news apps there had been 634 \u201cleft-leaning articles\u201d about the Iran war and only 41 \u201cright-leaning articles.\u201d The DoD account captioned it: \u201cSecretary Hegseth was right \u2014 the media is filled with Pharisees.\u201d<\/p>\n

Putting aside the absurdity of the graphic that labeled any story noting how the war wasn\u2019t going well or how the U.S. was committing war crimes as \u201cleft-leaning\u201d (instead of reality-based), the use of \u201cPharisee\u201d as a stand-in for \u201cleft-leaning\u201d journalist shows how divorced from the biblical texts Hegseth\u2019s favorite new insult has become. And as his use of it at the press conference suggests, he\u2019s calling someone a \u201cPharisee\u201d simply based on whether they criticize Trump or the war in Iran, which makes Trump the Jesus-like figure in that analogy (not that Trump would ever depict himself as the Great Physician).<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another problem with how Hegseth is using the term \u201cPharisees\u201d as an insult: He seems to be drawing upon inaccurate and antisemitic uses of the term. But he refuses to stop, even when confronted about it being disrespectful.<\/p>\n

While testifying<\/a> before a U.S. Senate committee last week, Hegseth again invoked the old Jewish group as he attacked journalists for not being pro-war enough (and pro-administration spin enough). A bit later in the hearing, Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada criticized him for using the \u201cproblematic and historically weaponized term that casts Jewish communities as hypocritical or morally corrupt.\u201d As Hegseth dismissively laughed at the senator, who is Jewish and even served as president of her Reform synagogue before entering politics, she insisted that \u201cwords matter.\u201d Noting that such rhetoric can suggest his department \u201cis going to target specific groups or individuals of people based on their religion,\u201d she asked why he\u2019s using the term in \u201ca historically hurtful\u201d way.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like it\u2019s a pretty accurate term for folks who don\u2019t see the plank in their own eye and always want to see what\u2019s wrong with an operation as opposed to the historic success of preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, so I stand by it,\u201d he insisted as he borrowed a teaching from Jesus that was actually directed toward his disciples and not the Pharisees (and that wasn\u2019t about dropping bombs since it\u2019s literally found in the same sermon as \u201clove your enemies\u201d).<\/p>\n

Rosen angrily responded by blasting Hegseth for not being respectful and for being antisemitic. In response, Hegseth quietly sat as if being dared<\/a> by Samuel L. Jackson to \u201csay \u2018what\u2019 again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given Hegseth\u2019s insistence on co-opting a biblical term and employing it out of context as an insult against reporters doing their job, this issue of A Public Witness takes a look at the real Pharisees and the lesson Hegseth is missing with his childish name-calling.<\/p>\n

New Testament professor Roland Deines has called<\/a> the Pharisees \u201cgood guys with bad press.\u201d If Hegseth learns that, he might switch course and borrow from<\/a> Paul to declare himself \u201ca Pharisee, a son of Pharisees.\u201d<\/p>\n

That description of \u201cgood guys with bad press\u201d might surprise many Christians since the group often gets a bad rap in sermons. But the assessment by Deines is widely shared among New Testament scholars and among Jewish scholars and rabbis.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The rest of this piece<\/a>\u00a0is only available to paid subscribers of the\u00a0Word&Way newsletter A Public Witness.\u00a0Subscribe today<\/a> to read this essay and all previous issues and receive future ones in your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cOur press is just like these Pharisees,\u201d Hegseth declared during a press conference last month after recounting a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61447,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[120],"tags":[8072,1567,1102,12,34,6994,9710,8643,18,21047,2542,36455],"class_list":["post-61446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pete-hegseth","tag-antisemitism","tag-bible","tag-democracy","tag-donald-trump","tag-iran","tag-jesus","tag-journalism","tag-judaism","tag-pete-hegseth","tag-pharisees","tag-religion-and-politics","tag-roman-empire"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116535279861008125","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61446","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=61446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}