Part Two: Pete Hegseth's Fascist Book 'American Crusade'

Robert and Jamie learn how Pete Hegseth thinks Islam works, and discuss his plan to purge the U. S. of undesirables. Sources: Pete Hegseth: Police report lays out details, timeline of sexual assault allegation : NPR https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199630/police-report-gives-details-timeline-of-the-sexual-assault-claim-against-pete-hegseth Pete Hegseth paid $50,000 to a woman alleging 2017 sexual assault | CNN Politics https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/23/politics/pete-hegseth-payment-woman-sexual-assault-allegation Pete Hegseth’s Secret History | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history Scholars Say White Supremacists Chanting 'Deus Vult' Got History Wrong : NPR https://www.npr.org/2017/09/04/548505783/scholars-say-white-supremacists-chanting-deus-vult-got-history-wrong Historian: Crusader motto "Deus vult" is a myth - english.katholisch.de https://english.katholisch.de/artikel/57572-historian-crusader-motto-deus-vult-is-a-myth Pete Hegseth’s Army unit in Iraq was rocked by a war crimes case - The Washington Post https://archive.is/AaxVA#selection-1201.0-1207.62 "Five Ways Christian Families Are Under Attack" Pastor Chris Durkin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-88LttXU0M The Crusades, the first holy war | Submission.org - Your best source for Submission (Islam) https://submission.org/Crusades.html These brave Afghans helped the U. S. after 9/11. Now the U. S. wants to deport them. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/brave-afghans-911-trump-administration-deportation-rcna204229 Pete Hegseth’s Army unit in Iraq was rocked by a war crimes case - The Washington Post https://archive.is/AaxVA An Appointment in Samarra | National Review https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/08/appointment-samarra-pete-hegseth/ Republican Hegseth is out of U. S. Senate race. For good. https://www.startribune.com/republican-hegseth-is-out-of-u-s-senate-race-for-good/153704075 Pete Hegseth and His ‘Battle Cry’ for a New Christian Crusade - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/us/hegseth-church-crusades.html Trump Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth’s books foreground anti-Muslim rhetoric | Trump administration | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/28/pete-hegseth-trump-anti-muslim-book Pete Hegseth: Faith, Family, Freedom, and the American Mind | Nashville Christian Family Magazine https://nashchristian.com/2023/12/pete-hegseth-faith-family-freedom-and-the-american-mind/ What the firestorm over Rep. Omar’s remarks says about anti-Semitism in America | PBS News https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-the-firestorm-over-rep-omars-remarks-says-about-anti-semitism-in-america See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  All right, listeners, update. I went over to Elizabeth the not so dying squirrel, and she scurried away into-

• 0:12Robert Evans?

  Welcome to Behind the Bastards, by the way.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Into the cy- yeah, what? Fuck off. You're gonna do a good- you're gonna do a normal intro?

• 0:19Robert Evans?

  Some of us have to be professionals here, Sophie. Someone has to be a professional.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  So, just to say, maybe I was right not to smash her with a rock and to feel sadness on the inside, and maybe she's okay.

• 0:32Robert Evans?

  I didn't get to evaluate her with myself, so I just said, "If she's suffering, you should smash her with a rock." That's the humane thing to do, you know?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Well, in that case, I mean, smash- we're all suffering, in a way.

• 0:44Robert Evans?

  And are we not all praying for an asteroid to hit?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  I am begging to be smashed with a rock at the end of the day.

• 0:50Robert Evans?

  Are we not all begging for the asteroid?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  I'm realizing- I hope Elizabeth the not so dying squirrel scurried away and now is like, you know-

• 0:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I hope she's fine now, but you know-

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Enjoying an acorn.

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  If you're not- if something's not fine, you always have rocks. A big enough rock can stop anyone's pain. You know? That's the truth about rocks.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  I always have my phone that can call you, who has rocks.

• 1:12Robert Evans?

  I've got lots- I got so many rocks.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Because I'm not throwing a rock at Elizabeth.

• 1:16Robert Evans?

  You don't throw the rock. That's not nearly- like, that's the odds of you missing and just injuring the animal, you know, that's just inhumane.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Oh, Robert. I've been carrying- I've been carrying around the same rock for 20 years, and I'm shocked- I'm shocked how easy it is to get a rock onto- I mean, I guess it's a plane-

• 1:33Robert Evans?

  Jamie, you're very experienced killing. Like, we've established that on the show.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Don't start this shit again. Okay, listen. I can't afford this anymore.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  This has followed me- I just got back from my book tour, and these accusations have followed me around the country.

• 1:50Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  I've been heckled. Sufferable.

• 1:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, for those deaths and- fuck, what was the town I made up you killing people in?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Oh my god, I can't forget. I can't forget because this yelled at me all the time.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Unbelievable. There's so many people who like, I've signed a book and then they've leaned in conspiratorially and said, I'm okay with what you did in Grand Rapids.

• 2:16Robert Evans?

  Good, you know?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  They're sickos.

• 2:20Robert Evans?

  We're manufacturing consent so that when you do have to kill somebody, everyone's like, it's fine for Jamie to do this.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  This is a psychological experiment.

• 2:27Robert Evans?

  I'm giving you a get it out of jail free card here.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Look, I, and now I, now I feel like I shouldn't even say it like, but how easy it is to get a-

• 2:33Robert Evans?

  We're gonna take the jewelry pool. It's gonna be like a fucking Luigi situation.

• 2:39Robert Evans?

  She must've had a reason.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Look, in his defense, I, I mean, Luigi, the Luigi defense is, Your Honor, will we put this hottie behind bars? I think not.

• 2:48Robert Evans?

  Come on.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  He's too, he's just simply too.

• 2:52Robert Evans?

  Come on.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Are you not foaming? Are you not foaming?

• 2:55Robert Evans?

  Come on.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  I just, I've been bringing, uh, I've gotten a rock, like a rock that could probably do some damage through like airport security all the time. It's really shocking.

• 3:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cause they, the rocks don't set off the metal detectors. I don't think there's specifically a rule against taking a rock on a plane. Cause like, there's gym girls, you know?

• 3:13Speaker 00

  It's true.

• 3:14Robert Evans?

  I think it's probably fine to take a big rock on a plane, you know?

• 3:17Speaker 00

  I can, I can confirm, you will not have a problem with the rock.

• 3:21Robert Evans?

  You know what? I'm gonna, I'm gonna use the company money to book like 20 different flights in the course of like two weeks and just repeatedly take flights with larger, start with a small rock and just to go up by like a half inch diameter each time and see at what point they're like, you can't take that on a plane, sir.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  I bet, my guess is there'll be a point where they'll be, they'll ask and then there's gonna be a point where they say, we cut off. And then you should, and then you should just be like, where's the rule?

• 3:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Where's the rule?

• 3:47Speaker 00

  It's like Air Bud. What's the rule that says a dog can't play basketball? What's the rule that I can't have a rock on a plane? It's a souvenir. You can't prove it's not.

• 3:55Robert Evans?

  It's a souvenir rock from wherever I found it.

• 4:00Robert Evans?

  So Jamie, this has all been fun. You know what's not gonna be fun?

• 4:04Speaker 00

  With the rest of the episode?

• 4:05Robert Evans?

  Returning to Pete Hegseth's fascist manifesto.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  I cannot believe, I thought for sure you were finishing the book, but it was just starting.

• 4:13Robert Evans?

  No, no, there's so many, there's almost a normal books number of words in this book, or roughly a normal books number of words in this book.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  That's shocking. I feel like they're, they're like really, you know, pamphlet-y.

• 4:24Robert Evans?

  I mean, you know, actually, I happen to agree, you know, some of the, some of the quotes on the back of the book, one of them stated, uh, this is, this is Pete Hegseth's raw dog, which since it came out a couple of years before your book, was a weird statement to make. But, you know, it is true that publishers who commune regularly with the, uh, the sacred spirits of the Oracle of Delphi have been awaiting your book for generations, you know?

• 4:47Speaker 00

  It's, it, it, look, I, I realize that it was fulfilling a prophecy of sorts.

• 4:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there are references to raw dog in, oh, fuck, it was gonna be a great joke. I forgot the name of the oldest story ever. Fuck with the, with the fucking, the monster and the guy with the sword. God damn it.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  What's the oldest book in the world?

• 5:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like the oldest, like, proper.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  I have no idea.

• 5:11Robert Evans?

  Not novel, uh.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  You talking about the Epic of Gilgamesh?

• 5:15Robert Evans?

  The Epic of Gilgamesh, god damn it. Yes. Jesus Christ. I fucked that up so bad.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  No, what were you, what were you gonna say, Robert, about the Epic of Gilgamesh?

• 5:25Robert Evans?

  I was going to say there were references to raw dog in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but I forgot the name of the Epic of Gilgamesh and I just ruined the whole bit. It's fucked.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  It's okay, I fact-checked it for you.

• 5:36Robert Evans?

  Thank you, thank you, Sophie. Jesus Christ. Oh, god.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Technically, it was a poem, but you know.

• 5:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a poem, whatever.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  It counts, it counts.

• 5:45Robert Evans?

  It counts.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Just like Pete Hegseth's raw dog.

• 5:49Robert Evans?

  Hegseth's raw dog, yeah. American crusade.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  I, I love a good name competition. It would be, it would be great if there was a right-wing book that couldn't use the title Raw Dog.

• 5:59Robert Evans?

  I was just thinking how funny it would be if, like, you get made Secretary of Defense next and, like, journalists at, like, New York Magazine are, like, quoting from Raw Dog to try to determine how you'll run the military?

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Bunch of woke bullshit.

• 6:13Robert Evans?

  We really don't know where she's gonna go, actually. This is, this is anybody's game.

• 6:19Robert Evans?

  Impossible to predict her policy on Iran based on this hot dog book.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Look, there's a, I think some of my policies are in there. My international policy remains absolutely inscrutable.

• 6:30Robert Evans?

  I know, and you do spend, there is that weird chunk in the middle of Raw Dog where you spend 40 pages arguing in favor of the littoral defense ships that the US Navy was building for a while, which-

• 6:39Speaker 00

  I think that, when you read it, it sounds out of context, but when you read it, it actually makes quite a lot of sense why it's there.

• 6:46Robert Evans?

  They are the hot dogs of the sea. A lot of sailors say so.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  That's exactly it.

• 6:55Speaker 03

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• 6:59Robert Evans?

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• 7:43Robert Evans?

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• 8:06Robert Evans?

  So, we're now seven minutes in. Pete's next chapter is called-

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 8:11Robert Evans?

  2020: Death, Divorce, or Dawn?

• 8:14Robert Evans?

  Which I do love, like for a man who's been divorced this many times, death, divorce, or dawn, right? That's him talking about the different path the country could go down. We can either die, we can have a national divorce, or we can have a new dawn, right? So it opens with him talking about how much he regrets that he was a never Trumper at one point, or he was almost a never Trumper, right? And this is a necessary mea culpa from a guy who was on record as when Trump first started running, he was backing Marco Rubio, right? And Hegseth was a more mainstream Republican in this period, although he is still very, he's always been very far right. He just didn't think Trump could win. And also, Trump was like a weird New York real estate guy, right? He didn't seem like a real conservative, because he's not.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Right, he's a politician, he has to hedge his bets.

• 8:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's just a dick and a fascist. Anyway, um, his journey is one we've seen a lot of Trump's inner circle go on, right? The reason why they've been able to go from this guy should never be, could absolutely never be president, be a disaster, to, uh, you know what, maybe he's the savior of the people, right? The reason that they went through that is because the only thing any of these people, Pete included, believe is that, like, I should be close to power, right? And, yeah, so you just kind of have to, if you're in Pete's position where you have some documentation as being on the other side of things, you have to, like, explain how you turned around to licking the boot, right? So here's what he gives as his first conversion moment. "My first conversion moment was watching a televised Trump rally in April 2016 in

• 9:41Robert Evans?

  Southern California. The protests on the street were so fierce that Trump and his staff had to leave their cars, walk along a highway to be escorted into a back entrance of the venue. Helicopters followed his every move, and leftists were delighted. What was he talking about that was so controversial? America? Make America great again? Build the wall? America first? Outside the arena, the left-wing protestors seethed with rage. Many of them waved Mexican flags and confronted police." Now, there's no reason to believe that this actually had an impact on Pete. Pete, the reason he brings this up is it fits an established right wing narrative, right?

• 10:12Speaker 00

  I like Pete.

• 10:13Robert Evans?

  Pete, yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  I like that better.

• 10:15Robert Evans?

  It fits the narrative that like, we're only fascist because of the radical left, right? That's what made us be fascist, right? And obviously Pete's documented history shows this. This is a guy who always wanted politics and always had really regressive right wing views that he largely used to attack people he thought were less than him.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  I like, I just, just, I mean, where do you, in Southern California, do you think he was when you saw, when he saw this? Do you think he was at like Disneyland?

• 10:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  He was at Knott's Berry Farm.

• 10:44Robert Evans?

  He's getting hammered at Knott's Berry Farm, probably. Yeah. He's got to puke on a roller coaster.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  He's in the Fastpass line for Great Thunder Mountain. He's like, you know what? I mean, I'm going to give Donald Trump a chance.

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  So one thing I do believe is when Pete asserts that Trump taught him how to wage political combat, which is accurate from what we can see, right? Because this is a guy who failed to get a start in politics because he didn't really understand what Trump did, right? And Trump proved, you don't have to pretend to be respectable. You don't have to pretend to be nice. You can be, you can lie and cry havoc and people who are just as shitty as you will hate whoever you're yelling at because their lives are only filled if they have hate, right? Like, that, that's what Trump understood and that's what Pete learns from him. And I do think he's being accurate here when he says that Trump taught me how to fight in the political sense, because there's absolutely no evidence he knew how to do it previously. I find it interesting that Trump credits him for giving him a Trump spine.

• 11:41Robert Evans?

  And he writes that Trump taught him how to, quote, "Live the lyrics of my favorite rock band, I feel safe inside the violence," right? Of the political arena, right? That's, that's a, and now, I bet you're wondering, what song is that from, right?

• 11:56Speaker 00

  I'm scared to know.

• 11:57Robert Evans?

  It's from the Everclear song, "Santa Ana Wind," which is very much a Southern California tune about being the kind of person Pete hates. Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  His favorite band is Everclear.

• 12:08Robert Evans?

  Everclear, right?

• 12:10Speaker 00

  That's fascinating.

• 12:12Robert Evans?

  Particularly weird because the lead singer of Everclear, Art Alexakis, describes himself as a left wing Christian who despises conservative Christianity and wrote a song called "Jesus Was a Democrat."

• 12:23Speaker 00

  I was like, has he listened to the band?

• 12:26Robert Evans?

  Has he listened to the band?

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Ever clear?

• 12:28Robert Evans?

  Also, not a Santa Ana wind is not a song about like fighting, really. Like, that's not what it's about. It's it's about living in Southern California. It's about the Santa Ana winds.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Really good. Oh, a Trump spine, just a stack of Diet Coke cans.

• 12:45Robert Evans?

  Again, folks, don't make art. You know, burn, go, go out there right now and, you know, destroy a bunch of vinyl records, you know, annihilate human culture. I'm on the AI team now. There's no point.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Disco demolition, the people. I think people should always make art, especially if you're bad at it. Because if you're bad at it, keep at, keep at.

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  You're gonna, you're gonna say that, Jamie, until we get, until we get the fascist leader who's like, holding up raw dog and he's like, this, based on this book, we have to expel all the immigrants.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  His, so many of his, you should know better than anyone. History's greatest monsters were failed artists. Just keep making the bad art. If George Bush had just painted his damn landscapes.

• 13:31Robert Evans?

  You're right, you're right. I mean, that, that is my actual stance, is that we need a whole government department that like provides fake fans to untalented conservatives who want to succeed in Hollywood. Oh, yeah, Ben, everyone loves your TV show. They can't get enough of it. Don't try going out to any of the regular conventions. Go to this one that we're putting on. Your fans will all be there.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  I would be a crisis actor in that department.

• 13:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  I'd be like, really, good job, you guys.

• 13:55Robert Evans?

  It's mission critical. Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Honestly, just some soft reinforcement.

• 14:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, just like, like an elite military corps who show up at the standup nights that these guys put on and are like, they have like a Navy SEAL Hell Week boot camp for how to pretend to laugh at them.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Although, when you, when you put it like that, they are kind of doing that.

• 14:16Robert Evans?

  Yes, no, this would be protecting the nation much more than any military action in my lifetime has.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Like, we have, we have to keep selling out arenas for these guys.

• 14:25Robert Evans?

  Those men and women.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  As long as they promise to never run for office.

• 14:29Robert Evans?

  Oh, my God, you had to listen to Michael Knowles's standup? Like? My country tis of thee.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Our bravest soldiers.

• 14:38Robert Evans?

  Our bravest soldiers, yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  So is that like this whole chapter is like, I mean, it's so diabolical where he's acting like a rom com character who's like, and I could really be my full self now. I can just be awful.

• 14:50Robert Evans?

  I could be like this sog I clearly don't understand because Trump taught me how to be racist and not feel bad about it. Now, the next few pages of Pete's book are a recounting of Trump's rise to be leader of the Republican Party. And again, this isn't really worth going over. We all know what happened. What is interesting is the account that Pete gives in this of his own first attempt at getting into politics, his 2012 Senate run in Minnesota, I A, which is not what it's called. Um, during, yeah, Minnesota, uh, during the Senate run, he attempted to defeat Amy Klobuchar. Uh, I say attempted because he failed. He blames his loss and he, he does not succeed in getting the Republican nomination, right? He loses the primary. He doesn't even get to go up against Amy. He doesn't even get to get Klobuchar charred. I don't know.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ.

• 15:36Robert Evans?

  Chocked. That one, that one, look, they can't all be winners. They can't all be winner. Klobuchar. Yeah, that's, that's better. That's better. Um, so he blames his loss on the Star Tribune, which he calls Minnesota's communist paper of record. Weirdly, and here's what's weird is like, I, so I look into it. I'm like, oh, so they must have like said, don't vote for Pete Hegseth, right? It's the opposite. They described Pete as a picture perfect outsider who seemed like he had a really good chance at winning the GOP candidacy because like, oh, he's a veteran, right? Maybe, you know, he could probably win, you know, but that's, that's gold electorally.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  So miserable when anytime a fascist calls a centrist paper radical, you're like, wouldn't it be great?

• 16:16Robert Evans?

  You.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Wouldn't it? Yeah. It's like, they're ultimately serving your project.

• 16:20Robert Evans?

  Phrasing the Star Tribune because their, their analysis was just shitty. Like, well, he's a veteran who will probably win, right? Discounting the fact that Pete Hegseth can't do anything, right? That like he's, he sucked it the last time he ran. At this point, he's had two different like NGOs that he's been a part of, and he spent all the money on drugs and partying, you know?

• 16:38Speaker 00

  That take is an insult to veterans.

• 16:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, yeah. Veterans could be some of the most fucked up people in the country, you know? Often in a, you know, I've, I've, that's who I started doing drugs with was a traumatized veteran. Actually, he would have been a really good Minnesota senate member, but you know, he's too good a person to get involved in the Minnesota senate. Yeah. Oh, man. Can you imagine our buddy Greasy Will in the senate?

• 17:05Speaker 00

  I know.

• 17:09Robert Evans?

  I, I would vote for him in a heartbeat.

• 17:13Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  I love that guy.

• 17:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. What a hoot. So he, he loses, and again, he's angry at the Star Tribune because they describe him as a really good candidate. And he's like, well, this is why I lost because like, no one likes the mainstream media. And when they said that I, you know, was good, that, that doomed me, right? That doomed me to my voter base, right? It's their fault. They destroyed me by being nice to me. And the reality is that Pete's campaign was doomed from the start because he's bad at this, right? He's again, he can't, he can't, Pete, he can't run an, he can't run a charitable organization funneling money into right wing politics. Cause he's too fucking corrupt, right? He never had what it took to, to build any kind of independent support or power. He's not very disciplined. Again, he's hammered half the time here.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  It's like, doesn't it, it sounds like that he's like wasted money that was supposed to go to veterans before, right?

• 18:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, it was supposed to be used by a veterans organization to support right wing politics. This, they were not helping vets.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Okay. So money well spent ultimately.

• 18:15Robert Evans?

  They were trying to develop, like push more support for the surge in Iraq, right? And then attack Obama, you know, like, I'm not saying it was, I'm not saying like, oh, it's a shame he wasted that money. I'm just saying he did waste the money, right?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  But it's like theoretically.

• 18:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, so I, I want to quote from an article, another article I found in the Star Tribune in the wake of Pete's defeat. And this is them talking about, it's, this kind of summarizes what an incoherent mess his candidacy was. And so this is right after he lost, loses the primary. Although Hegseth had previously said he would not run in a primary if he did not win his party's endorsement. He sent out a cryptic email to supporters Wednesday that raised serious doubts about that pledge. Mail was titled, "The Fight Continues," and did not say he planned to support state representative bills who decisively won the GOP nod at the state convention on Friday. Now, this all led to days of speculation that he was going to run against the GOP candidate, who had been endorsed by the Ron Paul Organization. And it was the kind of thing where like, they just wouldn't clarify what that message had

• 19:12Robert Evans?

  meant for days until eventually, like, they were basically cornered and forced to say, like, "No, I'm not really gonna run." Like, it was just a narcissist who could only respond to losing with sad bluster, even though he had been outorganized and out-fundraised and very obviously beaten, right?

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Right. I love, I love a good refuse to give up while obviously needing to give up email.

• 19:35Robert Evans?

  Well, obviously failing, right? It's beautiful stuff.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:39Robert Evans?

  So in his book, years later, Pete would insist that he was glad, now he's glad that he didn't win. He, I'm glad, and he says specifically, "I'm glad that patriots didn't vote for me then," right? Because they were right. I was still a rhino, a Republican in name only at that point, right? I didn't really know the way, you know? I hadn't accepted Trump as my Lord and Savior.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  It's really sweet that he thought people were thinking about him that hard.

• 19:59Robert Evans?

  It's good that they won, because I wasn't, I wasn't enough of a fascist yet.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Cope, cope, cope.

• 20:04Robert Evans?

  So, we conclude this chapter with another rant that the American left is an existential threat to freedom. Then we have the obligatory call to violence that he swears isn't a call to violence. If leftists succeed in turning it, it, the United States into something else, then, as strident as it may seem, divorce is imminent. If they turn into King George III, find me a town square in Lexington or a bridge in Concord to stand on. I believe millions of Americans, properly prepared and organized, would do the same. Our great flag means nothing without freedom. Better to go our separate ways, a new freedom country, loving country and all, than be complicit in the destruction of America. This is not a call to violence, not at all, and it's not what anybody wants. It's simply a recognition that freedom-loving Americans will not stand idly by and watch our blessed freedoms be trampled. Now, among other things, what were people pissed about? King George III about?

• 20:48Robert Evans?

  Was it that he was like deporting people without like any kind of trial? Was that like a big part of the Declaration of Independence? That like his troops were just like arresting and sending people away? Without any kind of due process?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  They're doing a crusade with gun. They're doing a gun crusade. And so actually it would make a lot of sense that it is. Oh, it's just so fucking embarrassing.

• 21:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Good for him. Good for him.

• 21:13Robert Evans?

  Now, the chapter ends with one final little rant about how 2020 is our last possible chance to prevent the collapse of the United States. You know, no more shots after this. The leftist will have taken too much control. Anyway.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  Oh, that would be nice.

• 21:28Robert Evans?

  The Pete Hegseth, who wrote American Crusade in 2020, was no less committed to forcing a far right Christian theocracy on the rest of the country than the Pete of today. But he was quieter about it. Not a lot quieter, but there's still even a little bit in 2020, more kind of creep you gotta put onto it so that it doesn't sound too bad. Like, the far right still kind of felt like they had to respect some kinds of properly patriotic diversity, at least in public.

• 21:54Robert Evans?

  So when it comes to the actual timeline of like, when was Pete radicalized? When did he arrive at his current beliefs? And what does he actually believe beyond I should be important? That's harder for me to say. Some of the evidence-

• 22:07Speaker 00

  There might not be much more.

• 22:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Some of his evidence, the evidence from his time in the service paints an image of a man that's less convinced than his present iteration of like a lot of the fascist stuff. He's gone on record about his upbringing in a Christian home, but in keeping with the traditional reborn in the spirit evangelical narrative, it's clear he doesn't consider, he will now claim that like young Pete wasn't really a believer, right? Not the way I am, right? As a kid, I wasn't really, I didn't, I wasn't really devote, committed to Christ, you know?

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Right. Well, it's it sounds like, yeah, you grow. There's a difference between growing up in a religious household and like enacting the and being religious.

• 22:43Robert Evans?

  I think it's more because as we'll talk about, the evidence suggests he was very religious and always has been. It's more if you are talking to an evangelical audience, the there is an expectation that you will give that your narrative of like your own personal journey to faith has to be a hero's journey. So it can't just be, I've always been religious and always been great. It has to be like, no, I rejected God. I was living this immoral life of the flesh. I used to be a pill popper, LSD tripper, high rising and low sliding, popping heads and busting reds, kicking indoors and banging whores. But then I got a man who was hung up for my hangups. You know, it's gotta be that kind of thing, right?

• 23:20Speaker 00

  It's was that top of the dome, Robert?

• 23:22Robert Evans?

  No, I stole that from the movie Marjo, which I talked about a lot on this show.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Way too often.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  You could have lied. I would. Oh, that's terrific.

• 23:30Robert Evans?

  No, it's beautiful stuff. It's beautiful stuff.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  Really, really good.

• 23:34Robert Evans?

  Pete Hegseth has claimed in a recent interview with the Nashville Christian family that his parents were Baptist, but quote, "My home life was not political, but it was very faith and family based." Now, again, this is nonsense. This is a common sentiment from people who are raised in very right wing environments that my upbringing wasn't political because conservatism is just common sense. You know, it's not politics, just common sense. It's like Christianity is not a religion. It's just the truth, right?

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Which I still think is more commonly accepted, like it across the board than it should be.

• 24:05Robert Evans?

  No, and it's one thing I'll give because I have a lot of issues with my parents and the conservatism I was raised with, but they never said we were apolitical.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  With your parents.

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  We are. We are very political right wingers, right? That was always my parents' attitude.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:20Robert Evans?

  So at least there's that, right? I just have no respect for this. Oh, I wasn't political. Yeah, my parents donated exclusively to Republicans and like I edited a Republican newspaper in college. And we went to church three times a week, but I wasn't really religious, you know? So Pete first gave his life to Christ as a teenager, but would complain after the fact that his public school was secular, right? And kind of blamed it like, oh, you know, I give my life to Christ, but I still wasn't really. Christian because of my public school. Quote, "It's fair to say I had a Christian veneer, but a secular core and thought I was ready to go out into the world and profess Christ. I wasn't." And the reality is, he didn't have any interest in doing that, right? Neither does he now, but he was interested in getting rich and being successful, right?

• 25:02Robert Evans?

  Because he's a rich kid and he wanted to content, he wanted to do the thing that rich kids do, which is get into finance and get richer, right?

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Bear Stearns, what a pick. I do, it's so funny because like the, the narrative you're describing that he wants to apply to himself, like it is kind of available to him where he, you know, like lived a, whether he wants to admit it or not, a very religious life.

• 25:25Robert Evans?

  All the drunkenness and stealing, but yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Right, but you'd have to be willing to stop doing that in order to have the narrative. So he's got to make one up.

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, he's got to make one up. And you know what else we have to make up?

• 25:37Speaker 00

  What?

• 25:39Robert Evans?

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• 25:43Speaker 00

  You sickos.

• 25:45Robert Evans?

  You freaks, you monsters, you, I don't know, heroes. I love you.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Bye, Steph.

• 25:55Robert Evans?

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• 26:55Robert Evans?

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• 27:40Robert Evans?

  Individually wrapped singles, eight-count pocket packs, and 48-count big daddies. So the wipe can match the crime every time. Dude Wipes in a good World War II novel, two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two. So stop Stalin, grab a pack of Dude Wipes and wipe the slate clean. Dude Wipes, best clean, pants down, available at major retailers nationwide.

• 28:06Robert Evans?

  And we're back. You know, every time I say I love you to the listeners, I'm thinking about one specific listener. And it might be you. You don't know, you know? But everyone else I don't love. In fact, I hate and am actively working to sabotage. But one of you, one of you I love. You're always in my thoughts. You're the only thing that I care about, you know?

• 28:27Speaker 00

  Everything, every time I hear you speak to your listeners, I'm reminded that a parasocial relationship could also be based in antagonism.

• 28:36Robert Evans?

  It's called negging. It's called negging, Jamie, you know?

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Oh, I've read the book.

• 28:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, that's, that's the bible of how to be a good podcaster is the game.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Gold Leaf, did you know there's a Gold Leaf like version of that book?

• 28:50Robert Evans?

  Why? Even the author is disavowed it.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  I know, I know. Oh, God, that's what it is.

• 28:58Robert Evans?

  It's like him and the guy who first came up with the alpha wolf concept, just like, oh, man, I, I really, this thing that made me famous and noteworthy was a real mistake.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  This thing that made me millions and millions of dollars.

• 29:10Robert Evans?

  I fucked up. I fucked up.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  And and then the humiliating pivot you get whereas the guy who who wrote the game, I think Neil Neil Strauss, like he was like, wait a second, I friggin love my wife.

• 29:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's actually now I'm happy. Yeah, like, like, it turns out this made me miserable and loving and respecting a woman is made me happy.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  I'm glad he knows he's wrong, but I'm also like, uh, stop publishing books.

• 29:38Robert Evans?

  Little faster, man. Maybe, yeah, maybe don't write any more books. Maybe you fuck. I feel differently about the wolf guy, right? He really was just trying to do good wolf research and just to just to fuck up, you know? It's not his fault. Like, he didn't try to be like, I'm gonna make alpha wolf a thing. He was just describing wolf behavior and weirdos ran with it.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  I guess I'm not as familiar with his trajectory. He was literally just talking about wolves?

• 30:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he was. The concept of the alpha wolf developed from this wolf scientist who was studying wolves in captivity and describing their hierarchy.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Smut I've read.

• 30:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And then and then it turns out that, like, actually, in the wild, there's like alpha wolf behavior does, we don't see it because, like, it's not really evolutionarily beneficial. It's a thing that happens when wolves are put in an unnatural situation. Basically, it's a thing that happens in wolf prison, not in the wild, right? And he has spent the rest of his career being like, no, the alpha wolf, like, it's wrong. It's not a concept in anything. It's certainly not a concept for humans. Like, stop talking about alphas, you dicks. It's a bummer. Yeah. Speaking of alphas, he eggseth. Real, real alpha male.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  I'm looking for this, but the name of this book, uh, I saw a friend from college like a year ago and I was like, what have you been up to? And she's like, I'm getting really into like wolf smut, which was not the answer I was expecting.

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  No, that's probably just straight up pornography. Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  But but otherwise, she was, she was doing really well. I mean, this is a part of it. But she, she like, recommended a book and I listened to it for a while and, you know, if this is your thing, go with God. But I was like, oh my God. There's, first of all, there's so much, there's so many of them. I, it was one of those, like, the, the bodyguards, wife's accountant type titles. I'm gonna find it. Keep, keep eggsething. I'm gonna find this.

• 31:27Robert Evans?

  So, you know, Pete claims, obviously, that like, yeah, he was secular at his core. He just had a Christian veneer. And the reality is that, you know, he was always been pretty religiously far right and politically far right. But he was, as a young man, just wanted money, right? Like, that's, that's all he really gave a shit about. He claims that the first thing that starts to radicalize him towards Christian nationalism is a class he takes at Princeton on Christianity. Quote, "Taught by an atheist famous for studying the Gnostic Gospels, the prof believed Jesus died, was buried in a shallow grave, and was eaten by dogs. I realized I was not prepared to combat such thinking, and went to the library to read dusty books that pointed to and explained the veracity of the Gospels. Defending my faith became an academic endeavor because I sensed faith and the Bible were good."

• 32:10Speaker 00

  And he was eaten by dogs.

• 32:12Robert Evans?

  Eaten by dogs? Like, seriously? I get like, obviously, there's a very strong argument to be made that like, well, the Jesus of the Bible was one, was probably conflating a couple of different actual guys who were like messianic guys who claimed they were the Messiah wandering around the Holy Land in that period, right?

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 32:29Robert Evans?

  Like, eaten by dogs? How would you even prove that? Why would that be an argument that a professor would make? And he was definitely eaten by dogs!

• 32:36Speaker 00

  And why would this be the first we're hearing of it? That is, speaking of dogs, though, I've got the name of the wolf porn I was...

• 32:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, thank God. The audience has been on the edge of their fucking seats for this.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  And I, and if this is your thing, I like, I don't want to hear more about it, but I respect it. Here is the name of the book that I read part of, The Tyrant Alpha's Rejected Mate, which is one word too many, but it's got 3.83.

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a long title.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  It's got, it's got like, we have similar scores on Goodreads. Okay, the heir, followed by the heir of parents rejected mate, followed by the lone wolf's rejected mate.

• 33:10Robert Evans?

  So a real rejected mate fetish going on here is what I'm reading.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's all about, well, what it's about is like falling in love with a, with a fuck-ass wolf who kind of is nagging you. There's a lot, there's a lot.

• 33:21Robert Evans?

  A fuck-ass wolf.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  That's how I would refer to it.

• 33:24Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  The tyrant alpha. But, but you could also easily call the tyrant alpha a fuck-ass wolf.

• 33:30Robert Evans?

  Sure. Yeah, that scans. Uh, so there's no real evidence for any of what he's claiming about his fucking professor here, or the fact that, you know, he starts doing serious Bible research that proves the historical, I don't think he does any research, right? Again, he's raised to believe this shit and it like funds, it fuels his narcissistic sense of superiority. He's always fit in here, right? This is just the explanation he has to give in the book because, as I stated, evangelicals expect a certain kind of narrative.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Well, it's also like, yeah, it, for lack of a better, like, term, he needs to be not like other girls in order for this narrative to work. Yeah.

• 34:07Robert Evans?

  And again, his initial goal is to get rich and then the global war on terror gets in the way and Pete winds up gravitating more towards the military. He claims, though, that during this time, he spends more than a decade studying Christianity, which kind of conflates with other things, he says, because he's argued in this same interview that his faith didn't become real until 2018. This is when he claims that he was properly saved and born again, just in time for him to jettison the last of his rhino credentials and hop onto the Trump train. The fact that those things happened around the same time that he's like, oh, I was saved at the same time I realized Trump was God's pick to save America. This is not really trustworthy, right? Although, again, I, I think the thing he's lying about is he's always been this guy,

• 34:52Robert Evans?

  right? He covered his body with Christian fascist tattoos, you know, and other fucking we the people shit, you know, like, I, I don't think he's lying about being a Christian nationalist or being a fascist. I think he's lying about the fact that this was a journey, you know?

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, it's, it seems like he has no issue with any of this at any point in his life, but he needs the narrative.

• 35:14Robert Evans?

  He needs the narrative.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  And, and I would be so curious, I feel like this happens in all sectors of public life, of how many times you're going to keep telling the same story about yourself to, to keep yourself like relevant and to keep yourself kind of an underdog.

• 35:29Robert Evans?

  Right. You always have to be an underdog, even once you've like succeeded, you know?

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:33Robert Evans?

  Uh, I mean, that's a big part of my ego, right? Nobody believed that we could have the largest history podcast on the internet, you know? No, aside from all the people who believed in me and fought for me and advocated for me and guested on the show and whatnot, like, nobody, nobody believed that could succeed.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Nobody believed in you.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

  Right? Aside from those people, right?

• 35:53Speaker 00

  You were, yeah, you were, you were podcasting from, uh, you know, just like prostate on the floor, not, nothing.

• 35:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  You had nothing.

• 36:00Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. I was, I was at the lowest a man can be, you know, living in an apartment on the edge of Santa Monica.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  So in a way, you also found God in 2018.

• 36:10Robert Evans?

  I did, I did.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. You and Pete have that in common.

• 36:13Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. My God was, was the pod, uh, you know?

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ.

• 36:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Brutal.

• 36:18Robert Evans?

  Sophie, if we register as a church, do we get to stop paying taxes?

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. What's this trick in the book?

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  Oh, shit.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  I should, uh, look into that.

• 36:27Robert Evans?

  We'll talk about this some more offline. We'll talk in some more about this offline.

• 36:32Robert Evans?

  So in like the kind of early chunk of the Trump years, uh, he and his family first moved to New Jersey to attend a community church called Colts Neck led by Pastor Chris Durkin. Uh, I found a year old YouTube video published by the church in which Pastor Durkin reads out five ways Christian families are under attack, which proves that Christian media is always about a decade behind because they've only just discovered listicles, right? This is like 2020 fucking four. Uh, now, the video does not have a lot of views, but Durkin is a guy that Hegseth is later going to claim was like a big influence on him. And so it's kind of worth listening to some of what he says. Uh, in a summary for the video, Durkin writes, "More than any time in our lives, it feels like Christian families are under attack. Are these contemporary attacks random, or is there a deeper battle going on beneath the surface?"

• 37:17Robert Evans?

  Um, he, he spells "they're" wrong, but I'm just being petty here.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Well, no, no, hand is asked to him. Also, I mean, I do, you do have to hand it to him that he did not change his name from Durkin. He didn't.

• 37:28Robert Evans?

  No, no, and he really should have.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  He really should have.

• 37:31Robert Evans?

  That's why he hasn't blown up in the way the next preacher we're going to talk about has, but.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  Should have been Gunner.

• 37:37Robert Evans?

  I, I will say, the way he talks, his speech is so, the speech is written so similarly to how Hegseth talks. It's either just evidence of how much this guy influenced Hegseth, or maybe they shared a writer, right? I don't know, not impossible. It's also probably the case that this is more the result of Christian grievance, conservative grievance culture just being very predictable, right? The overarching message is always that you, the good, normal people, are under siege from the evil outsiders, you know, the leftist or the enemy within, right? And since the chief enemy of Christianity is the devil, anyone advocating for a lifestyle different than yours is literally the devil, right? And that's made very clear in this segment of the Five Ways Christian Families Are Under Attack speech by Pastor Chris Durkin,

• 38:22Robert Evans?

  which Sophie's gonna play for you now.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  Designed by God as a gift from God, that through marriage, not only is it good because it's not good for man to be alone, that through marriage, not only are we commanded to be fruitful and to multiply, but also in the New Testament, marriage is a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ itself. Whether you're talking about God's character and plan and creation, or even talking about Jesus Christ, His life, His death, His resurrection, His love for His people, His bride, the church. This is going to fill hell with all kinds of fury, and it's going to be aimed at your family.

• 39:05Robert Evans?

  And right, the argument there he's making is that like, yeah, gay marriage, all of these different like culture, like it's literally the devil, right? Like anything, anytime you urge anything outside of like what Christians believe about this, like no, God decreed what marriage is. So you are literally on the side of Satan, right?

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:23Robert Evans?

  Which is, you can't have a secular society with these people. You can't be free with these people in your country, right?

• 39:29Speaker 00

  And this is like his-

• 39:30Robert Evans?

  That's the reality.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  This is baseline, this is his baseline. The listicle nature really does crack me up.

• 39:36Robert Evans?

  I do love that it's a listicle, yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  My, my college, uh, what do they call it? The like guy who talked at my college did-

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Commencement speaker?

• 39:44Speaker 00

  My commencement speaker, Mr. Jay Leno, delivered his-

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Wow, brag.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  No, no, he, he delivered his speech in the form of a list, and that was 10 years ago, and it was old then.

• 39:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Good stuff.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Brutal.

• 39:58Robert Evans?

  Okay, so, yeah, let's, uh, let's, let's get back to this lovely stuff. This lovely, lovely esopode. So, um, yeah, the underlying truth that is revealed by reading American Crusade is that people like Pete Hegseth and his fellow evangelical dominionists have no desire to coexist with anyone else. That's why they have to portray this as an existential battle, because only by pretending their enemies are the same as them can they morally justify the kind of violence that they are going to try to do, right? What little fun there is in reading American Crusade comes from looking at Hegseth's predictions for what will happen if the left wins in 2020 and comparing that to what actually happened. My favorite example of this comes right at the end of chapter two.

• 40:42Robert Evans?

  If Trump loses in 2020, I fear America is doomed. The Democrats, on track to nominate a radical leftist, would complete the political domination they already maintain in our culture, media, and schoolhouses. The ivory towers of the Ivy League would become the policies of Washington. Speech codes instead of free speech. Bye-bye Second Amendment. Anti-Israel and pro-Islamist foreign policy.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 41:03Robert Evans?

  Naked socialism. Government-run everything. Yeah, that's all what happened when radical leftist Joe Biden got elected.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  They should have been thrilled.

• 41:09Robert Evans?

  We certainly embraced anti-Israel policies.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, that one in particular fucking sticks out like a sore thumb.

• 41:15Robert Evans?

  Well, just how immediately all of these Ivy League institutions, like, most of them, just caved to Trump, like, you know?

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's incredible, incredible. Well, Pete, unfortunately, you didn't call that one, and, I mean, he certainly is benefiting from that not having happened.

• 41:33Robert Evans?

  Once again, we desperately wish for a Democratic Party that functions the way Republicans pretend it functions.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:40Robert Evans?

  Like, oh, how nice that would be.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  These radical leftists, these anti-Israel radical leftists.

• 41:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, oops.

• 41:48Robert Evans?

  So again, the big takeaway, the actual practical takeaway you should get from reading lines like this is that there was never any hope for the Democratic Party to pull away moderate Republicans or fracture Trump's base, right? That was never possible, not from Biden, not from Harris, right? Any Democrat, no matter what they do, no matter how nice they try to be to conservatives, no matter how much they tack to the middle in their politics, will always be attacked as being anti-Israel and a radical leftist, right? Period. Tacking to the middle and backing Netanyahu just caved off people who might otherwise have voted Democrat. You know, it's just a disastrous strategy. I need to write something about this, but like, part of when I knew, when I started to get really worried about Harris's campaign, was when she started like campaigning around

• 42:32Robert Evans?

  with Cheney, and I could tell like, okay, she's doing this because she, she wants to get, she thinks that she can get Republicans like my mom to vote for Harris. And my mom was a lifetime Republican, loved John McCain, loved Dick Cheney, loved George W. Bush, hated guns, like was fine with banning guns, was not like, and so, and was very pro abortion, right? And so, you, you would, I guarantee you, if you would like bring up the profile of someone like my mom to Kamala Harris, right? Or to Biden, oh, we can get this voter, we can get this voter, right?

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:07Robert Evans?

  This is someone, as long as, you know, we're not too radically left, we can speak their language and convince them, and no, you can't. My mom would have died before voting Democrat, right? She would have chosen death over voting for the Democratic Party, period, you know? Like, there was never any chance of you getting her, right? And, and the instant I realized they're, they're betting on that as opposed to trying to get anyone, you know, any moderates or people further on the left, like on board with actual like policies that will help them, was like, okay, we might be in trouble here.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it's

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Something that, just like another example of the right being far more like organized, for lack of a better term, than, than the left is, because there are people who didn't vote for Kamala because she would not move left, like. I don't know.

• 43:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's just the, the idea that there are good Republicans buried inside the party, and we can shake them out of voting this. No, no, no. Even the people who are like, good, who have more reasonable stances, who, you know, had issues with Trump, what they wanted most is to win. And as soon as you like, like, because of, and this is the project of 20 something, 30 years of right wing media, this was what Fox News accomplished. What matters most to the majority of Republican, like, like dedicated Republican voters, and obviously, there's a sizable chunk of people who voted Republican last election who flip flopped between, and those people are reachable, which is why they flip flop so often. When we're talking about the core of the party, their primary motivation is hurting Democrats,

• 44:39Robert Evans?

  is hurting immigrants, is hurting the groups of people they hate and have been taught to hate, uh, by year, at this point, a couple of generations of conservative media, you know, it's, it's inflicting pain on their enemies. And so you can't win them over by being like, but look, we adopted one of your policies, you know, don't you like this now? Aren't we better than that Trump guy? I know, because that Trump guy is promising to kick somebody, and they want to see somebody in pain.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I reflect often on that, like, that, the phase of her campaign, where there was a series of campaign commercials that were encouraging women, like, conservative women to vote for her behind their husbands' backs. Do you remember that?

• 45:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  That was just fucking miserable.

• 45:27Robert Evans?

  Like, it's not gonna, you don't, it's just, just bad choices, just bad choices.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  I do, I do believe that there were probably voters like that, but it's like, that's not the fucking way to appeal. And that's not gonna, who's gonna make the, exactly, that's not as, that's not as effective as actually moving left.

• 45:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, again, like, oh, wow, you know, this swing state has a massive number of, like, uh, Muslim voters. I wonder if they'll be angry at us completely failing to rein Israel in on a genocide. Probably not. They'll vote for blue no matter who. We don't need them. Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Of course, it's them who gets blamed.

• 46:04Robert Evans?

  Cool, cool. And that's not the only reason Harris lost, right? That's that explains like one state. There's a bunch of reasons, but the whole we're go we can. We can get these people, you know, we can, we can break off a lot of them because they're basically reasonable people doesn't work because they're not, they're not, their brains have been damaged by decades of propaganda and the damage is permanent. Anyway, um, this is the

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Good vibes, good vibes, good vibes on the poems.

• 46:35Robert Evans?

  Uh, anyway, I will say there's a weird kind of comfort I get from reading Hegseth's book, not because it's less awful or even less homicidal than I feared, but because it's the it's validating. It's the conservatism I know, and it's the conservatism I was raised inside put on full display, right? And in a way that I think I really would encourage, I found the free copy of this book online, by the way, I didn't pay for it. If you just Google full text free, you can find it too. I don't know the legal status of this, but it's not hard to find. I, I, I want to get Democrats who think they can reach out to Republicans to read this book because it really clearly, it really

• 47:15Robert Evans?

  points out like why it's that attempt is so fundamentally doomed, right? They like, anyway, there's another mask off moment, a useful one later in the book, when Pete has a chance to lay out the things he had.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  A useful one?

• 47:31Robert Evans?

  A useful one, yes.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:32Robert Evans?

  Pete, Pete winds up in a passage, laying out the things he admires about Islam. And this is part of he's still, he's making the broader case that it's an existential threat to Americans and freedom, but he writes this, "Almost every single Muslim child grows up listening to and learning to read from the Quran. Contrast this with our secular American schools in which the Bible is nowhere to be found, and you'll understand why Muslims worldview is more coherent than ours." First off.

• 48:00Robert Evans?

  Not entirely inaccurate statement about the Muslim world.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  I was supposed to say, it's like, points were made.

• 48:05Robert Evans?

  Or about schools in the Muslim world. Like, yeah, that describes some people, but I don't know. I guess I've just talked to more school teachers in Iraq than Pete has, who complained repeatedly that they just didn't have books anymore and hadn't since Saddam left.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  I don't think that was Pete's focus in Iraq.

• 48:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's not at all interested in that.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Was talking to school teachers. Okay, so I mean, it's just more Christian fundamentalism that if we taught the Bible in public schools.

• 48:29Robert Evans?

  Well, they're all reading the Bible. They're all perfectly informed about their religion. They're constantly thinking about it as opposed to like, yeah, most Muslims are like most members of any other religion where they're like, yeah, you know, on the holiday or whatever. But like, I got shit to do the rest of the time, you know? Maybe I get more serious about it if I get sick or something, but like.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  You know, people.

• 48:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're people, right? They got other shit going on. Pete goes on to argue that the Islamic holy books, and he describes the Islamic holy books as being the Quran and the Hadith, if reordered and read chronologically, show an inexorable passage from peaceful writing towards violence, right? That if you reorder all of the different, like, the Islamic holy texts, the holy books, reorder them to read chronologically, you'll see that Islam inherently moves towards violence, right?

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, and if you play the record backwards, it says Paul McCartney is dead.

• 49:23Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, exactly.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, there couldn't be anything more conspiratorial, like, well, if you build, like, okay, sure.

• 49:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's like, this mirrors Muhammad's own journey, right? Because Muhammad was like a military leader, right? And basically, the point he's making is that Islam inherently leads to violence if you follow it honestly. Now, this is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, a few chapters earlier, when he was talking about his friend Texas Omar, he'd made a big point that Omar is a practicing Muslim and also 100% American, which seems like it's not something that really should be possible based on how Hegseth describes Islam here. But he's also wrong about Islam a whole lot, right?

• 49:57Speaker 00

  No kidding.

• 49:58Robert Evans?

  For one thing, again, he states that the holy books of Islam are the Quran and the Hadith.

• 50:05Robert Evans?

  The Hadith, like, it's not a, it's not a title of a book, right? It's the name for a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad over a long period of time, right? And it's not really, it wouldn't be right to call it a holy book of Islam, right? It's certainly a text, a holy text in Islam, but it's not really a holy book. Because there are holy books in the faith. Obviously, there's the Quran. There's also the Ta'urat, which is the Torah, and the Zabir, which is their book of Psalms. And the last of the Islamic holy books is the Injil, which is the New Testament, right? These are all holy books in the Muslim faith, right?

• 50:40Speaker 00

  But he forsakes three and just adds one.

• 50:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, and he just doesn't really understand what the Hadiths are, that like, it's a collection of sayings. It's not really a book in the traditional sense.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:50Robert Evans?

  Discussing Islamic religious texts in a way that's accurate isn't something he can do, because then you have to acknowledge that, like, oh, wait, wait, the Torah is, like, venerated in Islam, and so is the New Testament, even though they don't believe Jesus was the Messiah? Well, then that makes the case that Islam's actually much more tolerant towards other faiths than Hegseth wants to pretend. And he goes on to note, quote, "Non-Muslims paid a second-class citizen tax, converted to Islam, or were killed, whichever way they submitted." And like, it is in fact true that there is a tax that non-Muslims are supposed to pay, like, and paid under the, like, the first Islamic empires, right? Like, a specific tax for being like, not a member of the faith.

• 51:32Robert Evans?

  But also, what he's leaving out here is that, like, this is a pretty significantly better deal than you would get in Christendom as a non-Christian. Like, this is actually kind of like a big mark of the relative tolerance of Islam during the period of time where it was like this expanding empire. Because once, if nonbelievers were paying their tax, they enjoyed state protection, right? They're people of the book, and in fact, there's commandments against abusing people of the book. And I'm not going to say it's perfect, right? And obviously, there's, you are not an equal citizen in, like, these early Muslim empires if you're Jewish or Christian, but you do have rights, right? And you have a better deal than Muslims are going to get in Christendom.

• 52:14Robert Evans?

  Right? And often, we just talked about how after the Crusades stalled Crusaders just massacred Jewish communities in Europe, right?

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:22Robert Evans?

  Like, you were better off, in a lot of cases, being a Jew in these Muslim, like, these areas dominated by these Islamic empires, than you would have been like in fucking somewhere in Europe, right? Like,

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Well, yeah.

• 52:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  You would prefer to pay the tax.

• 52:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Right? It's better to pay a tax and have some rights than be tortured by the Inquisition, you know?

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, not a fair ask.

• 52:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, again, I'm not trying to whitewash any of these Islamic empires. They're empires. They did some pretty terrible things, like all empires do. I'm just saying, if you've got to choose between being massacred by drunk peasant Crusaders in a pogrom, or like paying a tax, most people probably would say pay the tax. It's a better deal, you know?

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Again, it's just, I mean, it's so, his like, binary thinking. Every chapter so far has been like,

• 53:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Well, here's, here's what I agree with, including a guy I am increasingly convinced he made up.

• 53:18Robert Evans?

  And it's also just like this whole obsession that they all have with like European history, Western history, you know, the great works of philosophy, you know, Plato and Aristotle, these, like, a lot of great classic European think and Western thinkers, we only have a lot of their writing because it was preserved by Muslim scholars during the period in which Christians were destroying everything that was pre-Christian. So, anyway, again, not to whitewash any faith, all religions, with all organized major religions, especially when they have armies, do nightmarish things. And you can find plenty of horrible crimes committed, like the Ottomans, you know, by the Umayyads and the Abbasids, but right, you know, it's just,

• 54:02Robert Evans?

  the truth of the matter is that for its day, like Islam was a much more tolerant faith than Christianity, you know, at that period of time. So.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Which is interestingly demonstrated through the work and actions of one Pete Hegseth.

• 54:18Robert Evans?

  Of one Pete, Peter Hegseth, yes. So, right after this paragraph, he tries to do a minor mea culpa, and he winds up being both historically wrong and committing heresy. There's so much inaccurate in this next paragraph. I don't know how to summarize it, so I'm just going to read it to you first. Prior to the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, many of these same things could have been said of the Bible and Christianity. The God of the Old Testament was violent, vengeful, and very judgmental. But a key distinction makes these two Abrahamic religions very different. The Quran has no New Testament. And he goes on to argue that the lack of a New Testament means Islam is centuries away from becoming a civilized faith, right? That like, well, obviously, like, first off, there's, again, there's so

• 54:59Robert Evans?

  much wrong here. First off, he says that, like, prior to the life and teachings of Jesus, many of these things could have been said of the Bible and Christianity. But there wasn't Christianity before the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. What do you mean prior? What do you mean Christianity prior to that?

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Let him cook, let him cook.

• 55:14Robert Evans?

  Like, what are you talking about? Like, because he specifically doesn't write the same things could have been said of, like, Judaism, right? That, like, oh, before the New Testament, you know, like, the God of the Old Testament was violent and judgmental. But no, he says specifically before the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, this could have been said of Christianity in the Bible, which is like, first off, again, man, you can't even get your own fucking religion, right? And second, again, he says that the Quran has no New Testament. And as we noted earlier, the New Testament is in fact venerated in Islam.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Right. He just ignored it in his list of holy texts because it wasn't convenient.

• 55:48Robert Evans?

  Again, they don't view Jesus as the Messiah, right? They don't believe the same things about it. But like, there is stuff in there that is in the faith, right?

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:59Robert Evans?

  It's just wrong to say that it's completely absent. More to the point-

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Whether, whether he actually knows this or not, it's just like, it's, it's so clear that, like, this book is just predicated on how poorly educated his, his target audience is.

• 56:14Robert Evans?

  And it's this very common thing with conservatives that, like, Islam, whatever is the most radical thing you can find that was ever written by a Muslim, that's what everyone believes and does at all times, as opposed to like, no, I mean, Islam's like Christianity and any other religion, where like, well, you can find some awful things and people who are like, and that awful thing is exactly how you should act at all times. And you can also find some stuff that's not awful and some people who say that, like, no, the awful stuff's bullshit. You know, this is in, is everyone just kind of picking and choosing what to believe because it makes them more comfortable? Yes. That's what everyone does with everything. Like, that's, that's how human beings are with politics, with whatever, right?

• 56:53Speaker 00

  I mean, personally, my holy texts are, are, are titles like, "The Tyrant Alpha's Rejected Mate," but it is interesting learning about it.

• 57:01Robert Evans?

  That is, that is my religious text as well.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, what about installment number four, "His Curvy Rejected Mate."

• 57:07Robert Evans?

  No, no, see, I'm actually, I consider that like the Gnostic Gospels, like, that's, that's not canon. After the, the, we, we had our own Council of Nicaea, which was held in Atlantic City. To be honest, we didn't really get around to deciding what was canon. We were, we were mostly just partying.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm very devout. I've, I've read his Curvy Rejected Mate 40 times.

• 57:29Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, you, you've memorized it, like, like, like, like Muslim students are supposed to memorize the Quran.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 57:38Robert Evans?

  But like, yeah, there's, there's lots of bullshit people, but like, the, the common conservative belief that like, yeah, you just put pigs, you know, pig fat on the bullets, and then they can't go to heaven. That's not part of Islam. Like, that's just you being racist. There's nothing in Islam that says if a pig touches you, you don't go to heaven, right? You're not, you're even, you're allowed to eat pork in Islam if you're starving, right? Like, none of these, even within the text of the, of the, the faith itself, like, all of this, like, during Ramadan, you're supposed to fast, but there's specific exemptions for, like, well, if you're in a desperate situation and dying, or if you're fighting in a war, like, if, if there's extenuating circumstances, you don't have to fast. You can eat and drink

• 58:19Robert Evans?

  water, because like, even, even like during the earliest days of the faith, mom was like, "Well, I don't want this to be a straitjacket," right? Like, yeah. But again, you can't, there's no actual understanding of like, how the faith is living. It's just a bunch of like, talking points that you can use to demonize these people, right?

• 58:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, which is like, his whole, his whole platform depends on.

• 58:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, the wrongest part of that paragraph, and the thing that I really recognize, because my dad used to make the same argument, is the idea that virtue was, human beings couldn't be good before Christianity. There weren't really good people. Before the New Testament, it was impossible to truly be ethical. Right? Like, my dad would talk a lot about like, well, you know, ancient Greece and Rome were probably like the best societies possible prior to Christianity. Right? Because they were, you know, like, it's this idea that like decency was invented by Christians and people just couldn't be good before it.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  You could, you could be all right. That's such a weird, like, you know, scale to be on. Like, you could be OK, you could be all right, you could inch towards goodness, but it wasn't until...

• 59:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it wasn't until Christianity that we really knew how to be good people. It just wasn't possible. And again, let's go back to those drunken peasant crusaders who just decided to massacre all the Jews in their neighborhood because they didn't have enough money for a boat to the fucking Middle East, right?

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, really Christ-like behavior.

• 59:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Jesus would have loved that. He hated his own people. Yeah. So Hegseth attacks Islam for being, quote, "not just a religion, but also a system of governance." And I find this really interesting. And he brings out Sharia law as the usual bugbear here. But statements like this kind of lack the teeth they used to have when you live in 2025. Because in the years since publishing American Crusade, Hegseth has become a direct advocate for Christian control of the government and the supremacy of Christian religious law over the lives of Americans, even those who do not practice the faith. And he's done this, he's like, talking about like Islam's a system of government, and that's wrong. Christianity also should be our system of government, right?

• 1:00:25Robert Evans?

  And he's done all this while complaining about the injustice. This is a big thing he whines about in later writings that his, because he writes another book about fucking warrior ethos shit that we'll talk about at some point. But in 2021, he gets like, basically, I'm going to quote from the New York Times here. "He has said that he was barred from participating in the military security detail for President Biden's inauguration in 2021 because of a tattoo on his chest depicting a Jerusalem cross, a religious symbol that was also a symbol used by crusaders. Reuters and others reported that his tattoos, including the Deus Volta motto that has been used by white supremacists, prompted a fellow service member to flag Mr. Hegseth as a potential insider threat." And first off, good work.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  Fellow service member, he was. Probably shouldn't have that guy near fucking Joe Biden with a weapon, right?

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:01:14Robert Evans?

  But he doesn't get fired, but he claims that like, well, this is why I had to stop, leave my military careers. I got sidelined because they called me an extremist for simply being a Christian who has the exact same tattoos as the guys who committed a series of hate crimes in Charlottesville.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the same.

• 1:01:30Robert Evans?

  Weird.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  They kicked him off of WikiFeet for speaking truth to power. Like, you're like, okay, yeah.

• 1:01:35Robert Evans?

  Now, you know who will never get kicked off of WikiFeet?

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  The products and services we're about to hear?

• 1:01:41Robert Evans?

  No, no, they are the foundation of WikiFeet, you know?

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  It's true.

• 1:01:45Robert Evans?

  So send them pictures of your feet. Be nice to them. They'll love that.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  And don't check before you do it.

• 1:01:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  It should be a nice surprise.

• 1:01:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, let it be a surprise.

• 1:01:58Robert Evans?

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• 1:03:42Robert Evans?

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• 1:04:09Robert Evans?

  We're back. We're all sending feet pics to whoever sponsors the podcast. They're gonna love that. And also now, thank God, now that we have a Trump is the presidency again, feet pics are legal tender. You know, you can use them for currency. You can use them.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Feet pics in bath water.

• 1:04:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they count as assets if you're trying to get a mortgage, you know?

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

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• 1:04:42Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  Pretty good.

• 1:04:43Robert Evans?

  That's actually not, that's not a bad name, honestly. That's not a bad name. You know what?

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  It was right there.

• 1:04:49Robert Evans?

  You get a couple, you get it, you get some kudos for that.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  They've updated their interface anyways. Okay, sorry, continue. Pete Hegseth.

• 1:04:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Heg's Pete Seth, right? So continuing Pete Hegseth's book, right after talking about how awful Sharia law is and how Islam is evil because it's a political system as well as a religion, he writes, "Voting is a weapon, but it's not enough. We don't want to fight, but like our fellow Christians 1,000 years ago, we must."

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:05:20Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Again.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  U G L Y, you ain't got no alibi.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  That's literally what he just did.

• 1:05:27Robert Evans?

  So after the 2020 election ended with Joe Biden winning, and if you believe Pete, or Pete, feet, if you believe Pete, his military career ends shortly thereafter due to anti-Christian persecution. He moves his family to Tennessee where they attend the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, which is part of the communion of evangelical churches, which is basically a denomination, right? It's like an organization for a specific denomination of weird evangelicals. And this sub-denomination was founded by Idaho-based pastor Doug Wilson. And if you know anything about Idaho, you know that there's no more sinister series of words in the English language than Idaho-based pastor.

• 1:06:08Robert Evans?

  So about a month before I put these episodes together, Politico described Doug Wilson as, quote, "the new right's favorite pastor. He is famous for claiming that the Gospels give believers a stark choice, quote, 'Christ or chaos.'" And he argues that up to this point, America has chosen chaos. Quote, "Reality is optional. That's why you have people saying that a girl can be a boy and a boy can be a girl."

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Great performance, EGOT.

• 1:06:34Robert Evans?

  Thank you. I know that's how he really sounds. It's easy to see why Hegseth is drawn to this motherfucker. American Crusade is a book that advocates for Christian theocracy. And Wilson's entire career for like half a century has been dedicated to, per that Politico article, creating, quote, "a comprehensive blueprint for a spiritual and political reformation that would transform America into a kind of Christian republic." And Wilson is the real deal. He is a serious, lifelong, committed Christian fascist. Pete is not the real deal. You know, you could call him a Johnny come lately. Not that I don't think he's a fascist, but like he is, he primarily cares about himself and his own personal advancement as opposed to the cause, right?

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  It's not even, it's not even a positive thing, but he does care about his own bottom line more than he cares about the project of fascism. It sounds like this. Idaho P is pastor would really put a lot on the line for fascism.

• 1:07:32Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  But even the way that he's writing this book is he's writing to meet the moment

• 1:07:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  of the amount of fascism you can get away with and still be viable at the exact time this book comes out.

• 1:07:42Robert Evans?

  That is precisely what he's doing, right? Which is why he's more milquetoast than present Pete in some sections because he just didn't think some of that stuff was acceptable.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07:50Robert Evans?

  Um, and it's worth noting, again, Wilson's written a bunch of books, laying out a blueprint for how Christians should and must take over the country and dominate violently everyone else. Pete, his book is not a blueprint, right? He's advocating for the same things. He's clearly supportive, even though he says, I'm not saying violence, but we also literally need to go to war, right? A literal crusade, voting isn't enough, but also no violence, right? You know, Pete's book is not really giving a comprehensive blueprint, right? Because Pete is not that smart and is not a strategic thinker. It is your standard wannabe politician book, right? It's meant to stake out a place for its author in the movement by saying the right shibboleths, but the writing is both lazy and shallow, and it provides no real implementation insight.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  There's no ideas. It's just like Islamophobia for chapter after chapter.

• 1:08:40Robert Evans?

  It is scattered and somewhat desperate signposting for like, pick me, pick me, like me, like me, right? Like, that's what he's doing, you know? Whereas Doug Wilson has spent his whole adult life building an actual power base in Moscow, Idaho, where per Politico, quote, "Wilson oversees a network of allied institutions that includes Christchurch, a publishing house, a classic Christian grade school, a Christian liberal arts college, and a ministerial training program. Beyond Moscow, the network of churches that Wilson founded in the late 1990s, called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC, has grown to include over 150 congregations across four continents. An association of classical Christian schools that Wilson co-founded in 1993 now counts over 500 member schools across the country."

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  Hot. Okay. So he's, he's an effective.

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  He is an effective building. And again, not just in it for himself and his own, like in it to build a movement, right? He's very different from Pete. I would be shocked if he really likes or respects the guy, but he's also very smart. He knows how to use a guy like Pete, right? And he's, you know, the fact that he, before Pete became the SecDef, was seeing that this guy had, had the potential to go somewhere if Trump won again. Cause like, you know, especially after Trump got out, he really gravitated to the people who were just complete toadies and lickspittles, right?

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  I was like, Pete is a mark for this exact kind of guy.

• 1:10:03Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And Wilson was smart enough to be like, this guy might go somewhere. I should start getting in good with him. Right? And Wilson, this, this guy is so committed, even during the period of time in which evangelical, like, Christian nationalist figures had to pretend they weren't, he would openly preach his support for a theocracy. He has refused for years to refer to the Civil War as anything but the war between the states, and has described his personal politics as slightly to the right of Jeb Stuart, a Confederate general.

• 1:10:34Robert Evans?

  Great. Cool.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Awesome yardstick.

• 1:10:37Robert Evans?

  Uh, nice stuff. So while Hegseth was, by his own admission, squishy for most of his adult life, Wilson has been a howling committed fascist for decades. My interpretation of their relationship behind the scenes is that Wilson recognized Hegseth as a useful person who was desperate for a place in the movement, and Wilson was happy to give him that in exchange for having a future Secretary of Defense on his side. We see the kind of desperation Pete had to be involved with and feel like a part of this movement, despite his belated entrance. In chapter eight of his stupid book, Secularism: Deporting God from America, which opens with a stunning paragraph.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  Wow, what a title.

• 1:11:18Robert Evans?

  After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, one of the most powerful things to happen to our country and to me was the Christian conversion of the rapper Kanye West. Wait, the conversion of a rapper was a powerful movement in America and my life? Yes, it was. At first, like many others, I was skeptical of his authenticity. Is this a PR stunt? But when I watched Kanye live and listened to his songs, I was convinced. He loves Jesus and wants to share him with the world. Even better, he went all in, not content to live a private life of faith in order to protect his iconic image. What a shot of adrenaline for the home team. If Kanye is with us, who can be against us? Kanye is a changed man, but not a perfect man. As often happens throughout history and in our country, the imperfect people become the best messengers.

• 1:12:03Robert Evans?

  I should note that this was five years before Kanye would release his new hit song, Heil Hitler.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Wow, called it, called it. And he's now going by Yay Yay.

• 1:12:14Robert Evans?

  Yay, yes.

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no. Yay Yay, he changed it again.

• 1:12:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, I missed that update. Thank you, Sophie.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  I have stopped keeping up with it. I, that, that was funnier. That was a fun reference that it should have been.

• 1:12:25Robert Evans?

  Kanye's on our back. We can't lose. He'll never lose his mind.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  Well, which arguably, like, he already had by 2020.

• 1:12:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, no, he very clearly had.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  He was in active crisis. Well, uh, cool, so we've got Everclear and Kanye West.

• 1:12:45Robert Evans?

  Yep, Everclear and Kanye West. God, my two heroes, you know?

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  Wow. Talk about building a coalition.

• 1:12:53Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, I'm putting together a team.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  My, my favorite part of that quote is when he said, he, he, when he, when he's talking about how like he, he went all, he could really commit to it. And you're like, yes, you're not, like a broken clock, Pete, broken clock. You're right.

• 1:13:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So we get another example after this of how inconsistent Pete's own account of his own past is. Hegseth tries to draw a comparison between Kanye's upbringing, which he describes as rooted in good Christian values, and his own, claiming that faith in Jesus was front and center in his childhood upbringing, which is the opposite of the claim he's made more recently in that Christian magazine. Now, we can look at the actual things Pete claimed and say, dude, you were always raised to be the guy you are. At no point did secular society step in to force you to stop being religious. At no point did you have anything but like, complete support for being the kind of right-wing, Christian nationalist weirdo that you are from our society. But, you know.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  It's really, like, he's, he's so committed to this conception he has of himself. But the more we talk about it, the more I'm like, you know, what you're describing, it's like, technically less compelling, but it makes him seem more competent than he is of like, I was like, born to occupy this role. I feel like that is an equally compelling narrative that he's just too insecure to even admit.

• 1:14:16Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  Like, I was born to be a far-right, like, fail son that rises to power. That seems to be true.

• 1:14:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, yes, that is like, you were crafted in a lab to be this exact shithead. Yes. And nothing about our society did anything but encourage it. So in the next segment of the book, he claims to be self-aware of his sinful nature, and he says this, "Without knowing, fearing, and recognizing God, I would be like a ship lost at sea, wrecked and sunk." You get wrecked plenty as it is, buddy. "And trust me, I have almost been sunk more times than I can admit on these pages." Yeah, you have. "I've only seen 40 short years on this earth, and I've been divorced twice, almost gone bankrupt once, and been deployed with a bunch of toxically Max-feeling dudes thrice, one tour of, one tour of which included a war crimes controversy."

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  Oh my God, he's so

• 1:15:09Robert Evans?

  Controversy.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  He's so oppressed, you guys, when you think about it. I think, you know, really brave of him to call the American military toxic masculine.

• 1:15:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think he's making fun of the left here, right? Like, that's the point of it. But it's also very funny to be like, yeah, there was a war crimes controversy. Like, dude, per your own claims to The New Yorker, you complained that you were scared your unit was gonna commit war crimes.

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  Well, 2009 Pete can't come to the phone right now.

• 1:15:39Robert Evans?

  He also, he notes in this that there's, there's too much to write about in terms of his, like, sins and failings. He can't, I can't actually go into all that detail, right?

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  Well, legally, he probably can't.

• 1:15:51Robert Evans?

  Legally, he shouldn't, but we can, Jimmy.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:15:55Robert Evans?

  Jimmy Loftus, we, we absolutely can.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  And we must.

• 1:16:00Robert Evans?

  So, let's talk about the allegations against Pete Hegseth, R.E. sexual assault. We've already heard about all of his drinking and carousing and spending the money from his different charities in order to party and pursue women and repeated claims in that whistleblower report that he and others sexually harassed women who worked for the orgs that he was at. Now, that all existed prior to Pete's, you know, getting nominated to be the Secretary of Defense, but then, once it became clear that he was Trump's pick for SecDef, a new set of allegations kind of hit the public. And these, these went back to 2017, when Pete Hegseth was at a hotel for like, I think it was like some sort of a work conference. It was a Republican Women's Conference.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  He would be there, wouldn't he?

• 1:16:48Robert Evans?

  Yes, he did, he did. He met a woman known as, you know, Jane Doe for, you know, legal, obvious purposes. He met this Jane Doe at the conference, and they talked. Other people who were there recall them having a loud argument at one point, and it's kind of unclear, like, precisely what happened, but they were both drinking. They had a loud argument around 1:30 a.m., which prompted an employee to be like, hey, you guys need to, like, quiet down. And Hegseth responded by cursing at the employee and saying, I got freedom of speech!

• 1:17:25Robert Evans?

  And then the Jane Doe-

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  Wow, patriot, even at his lowest.

• 1:17:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and then, per NPR, Doe then intervened, telling the employee that they were Republicans and apologized for Hegseth's behavior, right?

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  I'd love, I love that that's the shorthand for a drunken argument. And we, no, no, no, no, officer, you don't understand. We're Republicans. We're supposed to act this way.

• 1:17:45Robert Evans?

  And because of the lawsuit that comes later, we have this woman's texts from that night. And some of them, she like, one of them, she says, he wears a ring on his pointer finger. It creeps me out. Like, these messages, they're pretty, there's one, I'm just gonna read the message chain. Do you know Pete Hegseth? She asks. Name sounds familiar. Who is he? He's a Fox contributor. I guess he does outnumbered and Fox and Friends. Anyway, our ladies are freaking drooling over him. Oh, okay. He is TDB Lite. Many TDB. Oh, you mean the man who tried to have sex with my wife? Not a good first impression for Pete. Right? They're talking about like, yeah, this guy's a creep. He's trying to like fuck everybody.

• 1:18:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And she says that he creeps him out. Later in the evening, Doe told investigators that she saw Hegseth rubbing women's legs and quote, giving off a creeper vibe. She recalls, because she is drinking too. She recalls that the argument that they had was that she got angry at him for repeatedly touching women at the conference. And so they have this loud argument and Doe remembers Hegseth saying, I'm a nice guy. I'm a nice guy. And then quote from NPR, Doe said that the next memory she had was when she was in an unknown room. This is from the police report. Doe did not know where she was or how she got to the room. Hegseth was in the room with her. So this is, she blacks out presumably. I think she had, I believe she had a tox screen

• 1:19:11Robert Evans?

  because she goes to the police, but I don't know, it may not have been soon enough that would have shown if there was something else in her drink. But, you know, blacking out is, anyway, she winds up-

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  Refer to Pete's previous writing on the subject.

• 1:19:23Robert Evans?

  And she, she says, I do recall saying no to him repeatedly, right? And, you know, she eventually files a sexual, like assault claim against him, right? That he sexually assaulted her, right? He maintains that any physical interaction was consensual. I wouldn't be surprised if he was blacked out too, given his own, like, I don't know what memory Pete actually has of this. But ultimately, the police do not wind up prosecuting this because they say they don't have enough evidence to go on. And Hegseth settles out of court with her in a civil suit. He pays her $50,000 as part of a, and makes her sign a confidentiality agreement.

• 1:20:06Speaker 00

  This is just like

• 1:20:07Robert Evans?

  Per documents obtained by CNN. Yeah.

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  This is just fucking wild. I mean, it's not surprising at all that it didn't move forward. But the fact that it went far enough that she had to submit her text, I mean, were there like kits done or anything like that? Like I, that's

• 1:20:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't think, like, I think by the time, because she didn't initially want to report it at all. Like, it's the, it often takes long enough that like, you don't get as early as you need. For that, those kind of screens. Yeah.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  I read a really interesting book, I'll just randomly recommend it, but I just finished it last week. Called The Secret, I think it's called The Secret History of The Rape Kit. And it's really good of just like how how much technology there is there that is just not used.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  But in any case, that's, I mean, not surprising at all that they didn't move forward with the case. But just the idea of like, well, what does constitute enough, enough evidence, quote unquote, like, and I know that varies from state to state, too.

• 1:21:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it does. And I got to read in terms of, because again, Pete makes the statement that like, oh, yeah, I was a bad guy, but like, he's, he's basically pretending and like, the bad stuff is I wasn't enough of an outright fascist, right? Like, that's like mostly the kind of claim that he's making is that like, yeah, I, I'm imperfect because like, I wasn't as big a piece of shit as I am today.

• 1:21:35Robert Evans?

  As a result of that, as a result of Pete being like, you know, I, I've almost been sunk more times than I can admit on these pages. I want to read one more quote about some of the sins that Pete leaves out in his mea culpa. And this is from the New Yorker's article, Pete Hegseth's Secret History. Hegseth appeared in October 2017 as a dinner speaker at the California Federation of Republican Women's 40th Biennial Convention in Monterey, California. His personal life was in tumult. In 2010, he had married a second time to Samantha Dearing, a coworker at Vets for Freedom. He admitted in an essay that year that he had fathered a child out of wedlock before marrying her, The Times reported. Then, in August of 2017, while still married to Dearing, he fathered a daughter with another woman.

• 1:22:15Robert Evans?

  Woman, a producer at Fox, Jennifer Roche, who he eventually married in 2019 as he endearing wrangled their way through a difficult divorce as the Times first reported, his mother, Penelope Hegseth, sent him an email excoriating him as an abuser of women who belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. She admonished him, "Get some help and take an honest look at yourself." That's his mom.

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  Oh my, well, that's what I call good business consulting. That's, oh my God. I mean,

• 1:22:45Robert Evans?

  That's his fucking mother. Like, Jesus.

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  Nightmare.

• 1:22:49Robert Evans?

  Anyway, yeah, I just love it when he's like, oh, you know, I'm imperfect, but God uses imperfect people. That sounds a lot better than like, no, I'm a real fucking piece of shit. Like I am a gigantic who does not at all live consistently with my stated values. I violate every rule God set for human beings.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  On a weekly basis.

• 1:23:11Robert Evans?

  On a constant basis, yes.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  It is interesting. Like he's presenting like even as like a piece of effective propaganda, this book is a, because it's so inconsistent with like, who does he want to be perceived as? You know, like, it just seems like he'll say, he'll switch the narrative from moment to moment, depending on what is the most effective thing here? What are you going to like the most? What makes me look the coolest? Which varies from chapter to chapter. Like in this, he's a wounded bird who had to like, and then another ones, he's a born warrior because Donald Trump, like that slid out of his mouth. You know, it's just, uh.

• 1:23:48Robert Evans?

  It's awesome. It's good shit.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  It's the, the, yeah, the, the allegations against it's like even in, I mean, and that's unfortunately is like a pretty standard allegation for a guy like this. And of course it's just like means nothing. Not to mention the civilian deaths. I like, well, this guy rocks.

• 1:24:08Robert Evans?

  So we're gonna wrap up here. The second to the last chapter, though, I should note is chapter 13 is called "The Front Lines: Education in Israel." And it's 90% of it is about how evil the education system is. Pete is like, "You can't send your kids to colleges because you're funding the enemy. You should destroy, literally burn your own, like, graduation certificate or whatever." Like, and he goes, he will later, he doesn't do it now. He says like, "Oh, I'm gonna destroy my diplomas from Princeton and Harvard," right, as a protest.

• 1:24:38Speaker 00

  I'm sure he did. I'm sure he did.

• 1:24:40Robert Evans?

  He claims to have mailed, sent back his Harvard diploma years later as a result of woke, but like, he doesn't actually do that immediately.

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  He didn't do that. No, yeah.

• 1:24:49Robert Evans?

  I don't know that he actually did that at all. It might just be a lie. Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 00

  He's a pet. That story is as real as Omar from Texas, as far as I'm concerned.

• 1:24:56Robert Evans?

  After complaining that, like, college is evil, because the whole theme of this chapter is that, like, college is evil because of what it makes Americans think about Israel. So after several pages of ranting about colleges, he writes, "You might ask, what in the world does the state of Israel have to do with any of this? I live in the United States. Why is Israel the front line?" And of course, the answer to that is that Israel is, quote, "central to the story of Western civilization, of which America is the greatest manifestation." Pete advises everyone to watch a bunch of PragerU videos about Israel's history and then goes through, summarizes Israeli history in like a page and neatly leaves out the Palestinians completely, right? Like, there's just nobody there. It's like, that's not a factor in the

• 1:25:40Robert Evans?

  story at all. He celebrates the big, beautiful army Israel has and talks about their unmatched standard of living, something that might surprise people in Gaza, and says that because Israel is such a great place to live, that's why American crusaders have to fight for it as strongly as they fight for the United States. Pete ends the chapter with these lines, "With the front lines identified, let's put a full-on American crusade into action." And the last chapter is just titled "Make the Crusade Great Again"? It's not really, it's just a rehash of shit he said previously in the book. This chapter's not necessary, and it's not really worth getting into, other than this line near the end. "The American crusade can be won, but not

• 1:26:21Robert Evans?

  through negotiation. Stale thinking and bipartisan consensus have betrayed us. This moment requires a total commitment to victory, which includes co-opting the successful tactics the left has used for years. We must be smart, tough, proactive, and bold." Anyway, that's Pete and his stupid book.

• 1:26:40Speaker 00

  I

• 1:26:40Robert Evans?

  I hope everyone had a fun week.

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  Going, going out on a chapter on Israel. I guess I didn't expect better, but Jesus fuck. And then he wrote another book called The War on Warriors.

• 1:26:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we'll talk about that one day. That's his book about, yeah, how America, like, we don't make people want to be violent enough, right? Like, we, we shame men for killing and stuff and like, yeah, it's just, it's just, we'll, we'll, we'll get into it one of these days, but

• 1:27:07Speaker 00

  No rush, no rush.

• 1:27:08Robert Evans?

  Not today.

• 1:27:10Speaker 00

  I fucking hated every second of that.

• 1:27:12Robert Evans?

  Yup. Yeah.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  Nailed it. So I saw an average episode.

• 1:27:18Robert Evans?

  A normal episode of Behind the Bastards. Yes. This was meant to be like an easier week for me, but I still wound up having to do a bunch of research because God, there's just, you, you can't just not talk about the reality of Pete when you're looking at like what he claims about himself.

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  No, because I mean, one thing I was, I mean, not necessarily surprised about, but there's so many approaches to this kind of book. And he approaches, and I wonder how much of it is just legal, but like, he says stunningly little about himself while also presenting no ideas. It's really just racism.

• 1:27:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's just racism and, you know, like callow self-interest, right?

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58Robert Evans?

  He wants to be a big man, an important man. That's all that really matters to him.

• 1:28:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was like, you could kind of like glean the contents of the book by looking at the cover. It's a book by a deeply insecure man who's about to get an undue amount of power.

• 1:28:11Robert Evans?

  Right. Ah, God, we love it when deeply insecure men get great amounts of power that they absolutely are not prepared to wield.

• 1:28:18Speaker 00

  It's the American tradition.

• 1:28:19Robert Evans?

  It's the American tradition. So go out, take power for yourself and then get corrupt and, you know, destroy huge swaths of the human race, you know? That's my challenge to all of you listeners. Go take power somewhere in the world, become corrupted by it and, you know, send us further down the slalom to complete collapse.

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  And, and all I'll say is, uh, Michigan, don't believe what you've heard. I'm a good person.

• 1:28:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, let her into your corner store, hand her an axe, it's safe.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  I'm not saying I, you could and you would be fine, is what I'm saying.

• 1:28:56Robert Evans?

  Absolutely safe, for sure.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  I hope to be welcomed, uh, in, in your borders and in due time, but I understand the healing is only just begun.

• 1:29:04Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. That's right. Well, you got anything to plug?

• 1:29:09Speaker 00

  Yes, I should plug my Cool Zone Media podcast 16th Minute. We are currently on hiatus, but it is a weekly podcast in which I talk to and reflect on the main characters of the internet, catch up with them years later, and talk about how broken the internet has made us. Check that out. Check out my book, Raw Dog, The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs. It's in paperback now, so it doesn't cost as much money, or just get it from the library, or honestly, even steal it. It's fine. I don't think I'm gonna get any royalties.

• 1:29:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Speaker 00

  And yeah, that's what I got.

• 1:29:46Robert Evans?

  Well, I think you are royalty, Jamie. You're the queen of podcasts.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  That's way better than what you usually call me, which is a murderer, so I'll take it.

• 1:29:58Robert Evans?

  Look, name a queen who wasn't a murderer, Jamie.

• 1:30:01Speaker 00

  That's so true. Okay, I take it back. I take it back.

• 1:30:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. All right, everybody. Go to hell. I love you.

• 1:30:12Speaker 00

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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