Actually sport it is a narrative
QuotePete Hegseth is odd. This isn't just a personal opinion, though there's no doubt that he gets widely mocked for his carefully cultivated public persona, which is a mix of megachurch preacher, gym rat and Robert Duvall's napalm-huffing character in "Apocalypse Now." The fact that the defense secretary is different is simply a statistical reality.
It's not just that he's a white evangelical Christian, a group that, according to PRRI, makes up only 13% of the population. Hegseth's church, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, is extreme even for the right, with a leader who argues against women's suffrage and teaches that slavery was the height of "mutual intimacy and harmony" between the races. Even within MAGA, those remain fringe positions, despite great efforts by some Christian nationalists to reignite "debate" on such long-resolved issues.
All this means it's hard not to laugh when Hegseth pontificates about his hatred of "weirdos." Although he has a war to fight in Iran, somehow he finds time to focus his attention on what he clearly sees as the greater battle: remaking the military according to the demands of his very white, very male, very right-wing vision.
"No fatties, no t******s [slur against transsexuals], no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals," Hegseth said during a Sept. 30 speech at the U.S. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. He didn't explicitly say "no women," but his kicker — "with testosterone testing on top" — made the implication plain. The "no beardos" demand may seem strange, but as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times explained, it's coded racism. Hegseth ended medical exemptions that allowed beards for people, mostly Black men, with certain skin conditions. This may explain why he has no problem when white men have beards, as seen on his church leader, Doug Wilson, or the many celebrities the defense secretary likes to take photos with. (Hegseth himself sported a beard in 2018.)
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. The collapse of the atheist conferences under the weight of their coddled (and curdled) testosterone. How about the author of The Happy Atheist, PZ Meyers? This site existed several years before he used that name for his book; not sure if a website has copyright grounds but it never was an issue anyway. Haven't heard anything from him and his devoted fanbase in years.