Nov. 18: Pete Hegseth and the ‘Extremist’ Smear Machine

Biden approves missile strikes in Russia; Israel hit Iranian nuclear site; Rick Wilson preps for the Resistance

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The Big Story

We mentioned last week, in our rundown of Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, that the president-elect’s philosophy for appointments appears to be a version of Robert Conquest’s Third Law: “the behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” The Trumpian innovation is to take the cabal out into the open by publicly appointing the bureaucracy’s enemies to lead it. 

One of those enemies is Maj. Pete Hegseth, the 44-year-old Bronze Star veteran, Princeton and Harvard alumnus, and Fox host nominated by Trump to serve as his secretary of defense. A vocal critic of military DEI programs, women in combat, and other social-engineering projects that he sees as peripheral or damaging to the core military function of killing the enemy, Hegseth is a walking repudiation of everything the U.S. military has become in its post-Global War on Terror senescence, in which winning wars has come to be seen as a barbaric relic of an unenlightened past. Unsurprisingly, many are less than thrilled at the prospect of him running the Pentagon. And so, following the playbook of the past decade, the next step is to paint him as a dangerous extremist. 

In a Thursday appearance on All in With Chris Hayes, the former NAACP lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill fired the first shot, declaring that Hegseth was a “known white supremacist.” While her remark might be dismissed as hysteria, it was followed up by a Friday report in the Associated Press and a Saturday report in The Washington Post confirming that Hegseth, while serving in the D.C. National Guard, had been flagged by his fellow troops and superior officers as an “insider threat” due to a “white supremacist” tattoo. So what was the tattoo—a swastika? A Sonnenrad? Neither: It was the phrase Deus Vult, Latin for “God wills it,” inked on Hegseth’s bicep. According to the Post, a naval intelligence officer discovered social media evidence of the tattoo in January 2021, and then distributed it to a chat of officers with the warning, apparently based on a brief Google search, that the phrase was affiliated with “the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and other extremist groups that participated in the siege at the Capitol.” Separately, according to the AP, the security manager of Hegseth’s unit flagged the tattoo to his superior officers, writing in a (subliterate) email:

I received the attached information today from a former DC Guard Member regarding MAJ Hegseth … and the information is quiet [sic] disturbing. Sir, MAJ Hegseth has a tattoo of “Deus Vult” on his inner arm (bicep area). The phrase “Deus Vult” is associated with Supremacist groups in which White-Supremacist use of #DeusVult and a return to medieval Catholicism, is to invoke the myth of a white Christian (i.e. Catholic) medieval past that wishes to ignore the actual demographics and theological state of Catholicism today …

Hegseth is an evangelical, not a Catholic, and the phrase, while it has been adopted by sections of the online far right, is also a generic Christian slogan popular among certain evangelical subcultures as well as among internet shitposters inspired by the Crusader Kings II video game. Mind you, the defense establishment labeling Hegseth a potential terrorist for Deus Vult is the same one that, as we reported in March, wrote in an Office of the Director of National Intelligence newsletter that the phrase jihadist was “offensive and problematic” and that analysts should instead use Khawarij, the term koshered by “Islamic sources” to “accurately identify extremists.” Nonetheless, Hegseth’s officers took the “insider threat” talk seriously and ordered him to stand down from protecting Biden’s inauguration. Hegseth later cited this order as his primary motivation for leaving the military. 

Hegseth appears to have been a victim of the Pentagon’s witch hunt for right-wing “domestic extremists” in the military, which, as we reported in January, was one among several bogus pretexts (the others being DEI and the vaccine mandate) that the Biden administration used to purge conservatives and others suspected of disloyalty to the Democratic Party from the officer corps. A December 2023 Pentagon study—the capstone to a nearly three-year panic about extremism in the military, much of it sourced to “anonymous defense officials” and spoonfed to outlets like the Post—concluded, based on a review of a decade’s worth of court-martialed records, that there was about one case of prohibited extremism in the military per year, with “no clear increase or decrease in the number of cases over time.” And as we reported on Sept. 27, bogus “insider threat” accusations were weaponized to silence whistleblowers within the FBI who raised questions about the bureau’s role in the Jan. 6 riot. Whistleblower Marcus Allen, for instance, had his security clearance revoked and was then suspended without pay for 27 months after being flagged as an insider threat for citing “extremist propaganda” in a letter to superiors that raised questions about the truthfulness of FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony to Congress. The “extremist propaganda” turned out to be the website RealClearPolitics. 

In addition to being an alleged racist, Hegseth is also an alleged rapist. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Trump was standing by Hegseth after being “jolted” by the revelation that Hegseth had been accused of sexual assault over an encounter with a woman in 2017, which Hegseth insists was consensual. We won’t pretend to know what happened there. What we can say is that the Monterey, California, police department looked into the allegation and declined to file charges; that the woman in question said she “did not remember anything” except being in Hegseth’s room, and had only a “hazy memory” of that, but that Hegseth’s lawyer has pointed to contemporaneous witnesses and security footage showing a “visibly intoxicated” Hegseth leaving the bar arm in arm with the smiling and apparently sober complainant; and that the alleged assault took place on Oct. 7, 2017. Why is that date significant? Because, as Compact’s Matthew Schmitz noted to The Scroll in a message, on Oct. 10, Ronan Farrow published his blockbuster New Yorker article on the sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, setting off the #MeToo movement. Two days later, on Oct. 12, the complainant made her allegations about Hegseth to the police. 

If these knocks are not enough to prevent Hegseth from being confirmed, we expect him to be gung ho about Trump’s reported plans to prune the upper reaches of the U.S. military. On Friday, Reuters reported that the president-elect’s transition team was considering firing much of the senior leadership of the Pentagon, potentially including the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and any officers “elevated and appointed” by former JCS Chairman Mark Milley, the man who appeared before the House Armed Services Committee in June 2021 to defend the introduction of critical race theory into the military, explaining that “I want to understand white rage.” Separately, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Trump’s team was considering a “draft executive order” that would “bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system” by creating a panel to evaluate three- and four-star generals for removal, allowing Trump to fire what he has called “woke generals.” In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth endorsed this program totally, writing that the incoming president would need to “radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership” and that “lots of people need to be fired.” 

But wouldn’t firing a bunch of three- and four-stars and elevating a man in his mid-40s harm U.S. national security? In a comment to Reuters, a source close to Trump’s transition team offered some historical perspective. “In World War Two, we were very rapidly appointing people in their 30s or people competent to be generals,” he said. “And you know what? We won that war.”

IN THE BACK PAGES: There’s a simple technical panacea for many of our nation’s most pressing problems, argues Michael Lind: A system of national ID

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The Rest

→On Sunday, The New York Times reported that lame-duck President Joe Biden had authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-made long-range missiles, known as ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems), to strike targets inside of Russia. The decision nominally came in response to Russia’s deployment of North Korean troops to the front lines in Ukraine, according to U.S. officials, but the timing of the move makes us suspicious. As we reported on Sept. 12 and Oct. 23, there is little strategic logic in authorizing the use of the missiles now: The Biden administration knows as well as the Trump team that the war is grinding toward a stalemate along current front lines, and the Pentagon’s own war planners regard the missiles as strategically meaningless, given that Russia has evacuated most of its key military infrastructure outside of missile range. While the missile could, in theory, help the Ukrainians target Russian and North Korean troops and supplies involved in the current assault on Kursk, we suspect that the real meaning of the move is political. Reached by encrypted messaging app, Tablet’s geopolitical analyst explained to The Scroll:

The thinking on the part of a normal strategist would be that Russia will be emboldened by a Trump win, seeing a likely end to the war at hand in January, which encourages them to try to go for broke now, so you need to give the Ukrainians some form of deterrence now, which you can do here with the stroke of a pen.

Because they are not strategists but morons, they more likely see it as ‘strengthening Ukraine against Trump,’ which is probably a line the Ukrainians gave them, as though they give a shit. The reality being that both sides at this point are desperate to do a deal, which for the Ukrainians needs to be “forced” on them by the United States. Because of the insanity of the Trump-Russia meme, the United States will never play that role under Democrats, leaving both sides with no choice but to bleed. 

→Axios reported Friday that Israel destroyed a “top secret nuclear weapons research facility” in its Oct. 25 airstrikes on Iran, according to multiple current and former U.S. and Israeli officials. According to the officials, the Israelis targeted the Taleghan 2 complex in Parchin, Iran, destroying “sophisticated equipment used to design the plastic explosives that surround uranium in a nuclear device and are needed to detonate it.” The Biden administration had asked the Israelis not to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, but “Taleghan 2 was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program so the Iranians wouldn’t be able to acknowledge the significance of the attack without admitting they violated the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,” according to Axios. In Monday remarks to the Israeli Knesset, Netanyahu confirmed that Israel had hit a “specific component in [Iran’s] nuclear program” and added that Israel’s ability to act against the Iranian nuclear program “will be reevaluated” after Trump’s inauguration in January, according to reporting from The Times of Israel. 

→Perhaps irked by the Israelis’ success, the Biden administration is following through with its preelection promises to step up sanctions against Israel during the lame-duck period, announcing a new round of sanctions against Amana, “the settlement movement’s main development organization” (Times of Israel), on Monday. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is beginning to dish on some of his frustrations with Washington over the past year, which he had wisely kept close to the vest prior to the election. Here’s X user Open Source Intel relaying the contents of a Channel 14 report on Netanyahu’s remarks to a Knesset plenum on Monday:

→A new liberal dark-money group led by former Republican operative and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson plans to “operate as an opposition research firm but with a military-grade intelligence gathering operation” targeting Elon Musk, the Murdoch family, and others in Trump’s orbit, according to a Saturday report in The New York Times. The group, the Two Plus Two Coalition, said in a donor prospectus that it aims to “target the hidden sources of disinformation and expose them for what they are,” the Times reports. The same article indicated that rather than encouraging mass protests, as it did during Trump’s first term, the liberal Resistance plans to thwart Trump through lawfare—one Marc Elias-connected group, Democracy Forward, has assembled a “multimillion-dollar war chest” and a “team of more than 800 lawyers” to challenge every Trump initiative and executive order starting on day one—and through the power of the states. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker have both asked their state legislatures to begin preparing resistance to the president-elect, and last week, Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced the formation of a group called “Governors Safeguarding Democracy,” intended to help blue states “coordinate their efforts” to oppose Trump’s policies.

→And in California, at least, the revolution will be taxpayer subsidized: The Washington Free Beacon reported Monday that the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) had poured nearly $2.4 million of public money into “anti-police groups” over the past year. Recipients included Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, an Oakland nonprofit working to abolish prison and defund the police, which received $1 million in June to “elevate the voice and power of systems-impacted and formerly-incarcerated young people through culturally-rooted healing, education, organizing, and legal support.” Gente Organizada, a Pomona-based “immigrant rights” group, received $700,000 from DHCS to give at least 30 “BIPOC youth” a chance to “reduce their exposure to the justice system” through participation in “advocacy activities”—all for the bargain price of $23,333.33 per “youth.”

→On the subject of lawfare and “defending democracy,” Blaze Media on Monday published an investigation of a legal nonprofit run by the Soros-funded Democratic hitman David Brock, The 65 Project, which has filed mass bar complaints to “make examples” of lawyers who worked on Trump’s election challenges in 2020. While those challenges failed (some on substance, some on standing issues), it is not illegal or “unethical” for lawyers to object to election procedures or certification—as evidenced, most recently, by the raft of lawsuits from Democratic lawyers in the Pennsylvania Senate race objecting to the state’s decision not to count undated or unsigned absentee ballots in accordance with Pennsylvania law. Brock—the founder of Media Matters for America and the 21st Century Bridge PAC, as well as the former chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Tides- and Soros-funded nonprofit behind the attempt to have Trump thrown off the ballot—told Axios in 2022 that the idea behind The 65 Project was to “shame [Republican lawyers] and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms,” adding that “the littler fish are probably more vulnerable to what we’re doing” because “you’re threatening their livelihood” and their “reputations in their local communities.” One of those “littler fish” was Georgia lawyer Harry W. MacDougald (the father of this author), who was subject to what he described to Blaze Media as a “flagrantly and maliciously false bar complaint” from The 65 Project over his work on two 2020 certification challenges, which were ultimately dismissed on standing. The bar complaint was dismissed by the Georgia State Bar Disciplinary Board in August. 

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Papers, Please!

A surprising number of America’s most pressing problems can be solved with a single, simple solution: a national ID. So why don’t we have one?

By Michael Lind

What if there was a simple, technical solution for some of our most pressing political and social problems? The writer Evgeny Morozov has used the term “solutionism” to mock the belief of many in Silicon Valley that, in the case of many social challenges, “there is an app for that.” So you would be justified in being suspicious if I told you that there is a single, simple, technical solution to minimizing illegal immigrant employment and voting in the United States—a solution which would also simplify the number of documents needed to prove your ID and could help with passing new privacy laws governing what for-profit corporations can do with your personal data. There really is such a technical panacea: a national ID for every American citizen.

Thanks to modern technology, the ID can be digital. The EU is creating a new “digital wallet” for every citizen. The digital identity can be used for multiple purposes, including accessing public services, opening a bank account, filing tax returns, proving your age, checking into a hotel, or renting a car. Far from being a threat to privacy, the new digital wallet will limit the information that private companies now routinely demand from users of their services. In Estonia for the past two decades citizens have already been using the digital identity system—the “e-ID”—to vote, pay bills, sign contracts, access health information, and perform other activities.

National ID cards—both physical, and increasingly, digital, are the norm in the 21st-century world, with at least 170 out of almost 200 countries in the world using them. Most countries, including almost all democracies, also require photo voter IDs to deter fraud. In its refusal to adopt these basic protections for the rights of its citizens, the U.S. is an outlier even in the democratic world.

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The idea of an American national ID is not new. In the 1990s the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by former Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, recommended the adoption of a computerized national registry against which prospective employers could check the identity data of potential employees; this gave rise to today’s limited E-Verify system. Then in 2005 a commission that studied ways to strengthen electoral integrity, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, recommended that citizens should be required to present a photo ID in order to vote.

Both proposals were thwarted by the opposition of three groups: libertarian ideologues, partisan Democrats, and lobbyists for big businesses that want to be able to hire illegal immigrants with impunity. Needless to say, the third and most important group—scofflaw employers—did not identify their motivation honestly. Instead, they were content to let the case against photo voter IDs and a national ID to be made by libertarian kooks and partisan Democrats on seemingly idealistic grounds.

Whenever the topics of voter ID laws and a national ID come up, the libertarians of the left and right screech “papers, please”—as though asking for a photo ID to vote or get a job is somehow inherently more Hitlerian than needing an ID to drive a car or buy beer. The “papers, please” motif is invoked in the ACLU’s official position on the subject:

As a nation, we live by the principle that the government should not be able to collect such information without cause. A national ID system turns that fundamental principle on its head. We must continue to support basic freedoms and protect against our country where the government can demand, "Papers, please."

The premise of the “papers, please!” fear-mongering is that you, the law-abiding citizen, would have to have your national ID with you at all times, or else you could be stopped randomly by the authorities and … and what? Be arrested? Summarily shot?

On many trips to Europe, I have never been randomly asked for my papers by any police officer or other official; I have only been asked to show my passport at customs and my tickets to get on planes and trains. So maybe making public policy in the U.S. based on stereotypes of other countries in Hollywood movies from a previous century is not a very bright idea.

According to the ACLU, “we live by the principle that the government should not be able to collect such information without cause.” But federal and state governments—not to mention private corporations—routinely collect endless amounts of personal information in endlessly multiplying formats, making life more difficult for American citizens than for citizens of other democracies. For some purposes you need a copy of your birth certificate; for others, a driver's license; for still others, a Social Security number; and for yet others, a passport number.

So why not substitute a single, universal, fool-proof photo ID for all of those documents, in both a physical form and online? It seems that freedom and democracy can survive as long as we have lots of different de facto and overlapping national IDs. But if we adopted a single one … cue marching Nazis and the guard on the train: “Your papers, pleece.”

The crackpot libertarians of the right agree with the crackpot left libertarians of the ACLU. After the Jordan Commission proposed a national computer registry for all American workers, the Koch-funded Cato Institute rushed out a policy brief by John J. Miller and Stephen Moore: “A National ID System: Big Brother’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

Anticipating the objection that we already have Social Security numbers, Miller and Moore revived an argument of opponents of Social Security in the 1930s and claimed that Social Security numbers have already put Americans on the road to serfdom:

The computer revolution made use of Social Security numbers prevalent in myriad everyday and public transactions. Everything from credit to employment to insurance to many states’ drivers licenses requires a Social Security number. Social Security numbers have become de facto national identifiers. All that from a number whose original purpose was to do nothing more than track the amount of money paid into the Social Security system.

Thank you, Grandpa, for your rant about Social Security as a tool of Big Brother. Now tell us again about why we need to go back to the gold standard.

But wait. It gets worse. National IDs and photo voter ID requirements of the kind common in other liberal democracies are not only totalitarian, according to libertarians of the left and right, but also—unlike passports and driver's licenses—inherently racist and classist. That’s according to progressives who insist that there are great numbers of poor people who do not have driver's licenses or similar government-approved photo IDs because they cannot afford them. Yet when it comes to poor Medicaid patients who have to show IDs in order to get medicine at drugstores, such objections apparently don’t apply. But even if it was true that poor people “can’t afford” IDs, the answer would be for the government to pay for them—as it does in France, Germany, and other democratic countries.

Is it racist to require voters to show government-approved IDs in order to vote? Progressives routinely describe voter ID laws as “voter suppression,” comparing them to techniques used in the Jim Crow South to disfranchise Black Americans, like literacy tests and poll taxes. Yet that comparison is plainly absurd—and makes a mockery of the real-world suffering and deprivation that Black Americans endured. Under Jim Crow, there was no doubt about the identity of the individuals who were turned away from the polls; Black voters were prevented from voting precisely because they were who they said they were, not because they were impostors.

In the progressive fear-mongering universe, we are supposed to believe that members of minority groups who are allowed to vote now, without a photo ID, would be turned away from the polls after showing their free government-issued photo IDs. If progressives were truly concerned about legitimate voters being turned away from the polls illegally on account of their race or other characteristics, then a government-issued photo ID would seem like an excellent method to eliminate the crimes they purport to fear. Yet oddly enough, they oppose this commonsense reform.

Well, perhaps voter ID laws are racist in a way that does not obey simple logic, but is nevertheless obvious to Black and Hispanic Americans from their lived experience. In that case, one would expect majorities of those groups to oppose them. Yet requiring all voters to show government-issued photo IDs is approved by 75% of Black Americans, 81% of non-Hispanic white Americans, 84% of Asian Americans, and 85% of Hispanic Americans. That’s right—Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans are in fact more likely than white Americans to favor voter ID laws, which three-quarters of Black Americans favor as well.

If the arguments against voter ID laws and a possible national ID are so ridiculous, then what explains the failure of these proposals to gain support in Congress? There are two reasons: Democratic electoral strategy and the self-interest of businesses and banks that profit from illegal immigration.

From the election of Barack Obama in 2008 until the defeat of Kamala Harris in this year’s election, most Democrats bought into the idea that immigration in general, and Hispanic immigration in particular, would inevitably create a permanent Democratic majority, consisting of the minority of whites who are college-educated and affluent in alliance with Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters who are clients of the party. That is why one-party Democratic cities and states have passed sanctuary city laws, forbidding their police forces from cooperating with federal immigration law enforcement—while rewarding illegal immigrants with city and state welfare services and driver's licenses. The more immigrants, legal and illegal, the bigger the future Democratic majority—or so they imagine. Needless to say, if immigrants tended to vote for Republicans rather than Democrats, there would be no sanctuary city laws in Democratic jurisdictions.

However, the shocking nationwide shift of minority voters of all races, particularly Hispanics, away from the Democratic Party in 2024 has demolished the idea that Hispanics and Asians as “people of color” will vote as blocs for Democrats the way that Black Americans have done since the civil rights revolution. In the aftermath of the election, many stunned Democrats may be wondering if they have accidentally imported the next generation of Republican voters. (If I may engage in some Tom Friedmanesque taxi-driver sociology, I would like to point out that two Uber drivers I recently hired, one a recent Nigerian immigrant and the other a Venezuelan, had both entered the country under Biden. Both men said that if they could vote, they would vote for Trump.)

The Democratic electoral disaster of 2024 may therefore be a blessing in disguise for both the party and the country as a whole. If Democrats no longer think they can benefit electorally by opposing voter ID laws of the kind used almost everywhere else in the world, the only remaining opposition will be that of lobbies for employers who hire illegal immigrants in violation of statutes that have long been on the books.

Employers who use illegal labor can threaten to punish elected officials who vote to enforce the law by funding their opponents in primary or general elections. But their cause cannot be defended in public. The cheap-labor, law-breaking employer lobby may attempt to frighten the public into opposing immigration law enforcement, claiming that without a serf caste of millions of exploited illegal immigrants who are denied minimum wage and basic safety protections there would be no food on our tables and the economy would collapse. But the cheap-labor lobby, shameless as it is, cannot publicly argue against voter ID and national ID laws without raising the question of who really benefits, and at what cost.

In sum, there are no serious arguments against the adoption by the U.S. of a digital national ID which can be used, among other things, to ensure that illegal immigrants cannot work or vote in this country. Any debate about what to do with the 20 million or more illegal immigrants whose presence is encouraged here now by the American elite is pointless, until future illegal immigration is checked. Requiring a national ID to work or vote is a good place to start there, too—at much lower cost than building a physical wall along the border. President-elect Donald J. Trump might prefer something grander, but he might be appeased by thought of each and every one of our new national IDs bearing his name, presidential signature, and smiling face, guaranteeing to each and every American their rights to fair employment and a fair vote just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

The argument of right-wing libertarians and the ACLU that a national ID would turn the U.S. into a totalitarian state is as stupid as claims in the 1930s that Social Security numbers would turn us into a nation of faceless government slaves. In the aftermath of the browning of the Republican electorate in 2024, intelligent Democrats should abandon the assumption that their party inevitably benefits from nonwhite mass immigration, both legal and illegal. What remains after silly libertarian arguments and discredited partisan Democratic strategy is only the raw greed and political power of sleazy employers and their well-funded lobbies in Washington and state capitals. It’s time to ask them to show ID.