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

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to talk about Pete Hegseth's life, times and horrible 2020 book. 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.

• 0:09Robert Evans?

  Thanks for, thanks for coming in with me on that one, Jamie. That was really helpful. I think we really, I think we knocked it out of the park. Yeah, that wouldn't have worked without you, you know? Just one person kinda atonally going, ah, nothing. Yeah.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  One of, one of you was great.

• 0:24Robert Evans?

  One of us is great. And you know what's not great? Sophie has a dying squirrel on her property.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  We're gonna, this is like ruined my entire day.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  No, it's canon.

• 0:33Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. It's canon now, Sophie. It's canon.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Do you wanna give it a name so it feels worse?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Jamie, no!

• 0:40Speaker 01

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

• 0:41Robert Evans?

  How about Elizabeth? Elizabeth the squirrel?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Oh no!

• 0:45Robert Evans?

  Elizabeth the terminally ill squirrel.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Oh, poor Liz. But here's the thing, I'm not 100% sure he's dying, but he's definitely not moving very much.

• 0:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's usually not a good sign for something like a squirrel.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Elizabeth has a lot of unfinished business. This is really sad.

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, she didn't get her will prepared.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Robert, I just need you to come, I just need you to come over here and do the humane thing because I'm a wolf.

• 1:07Robert Evans?

  You mean kill it with a rock?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Allegedly.

• 1:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else to do with, you know, suffering little animals. But yeah, when I lived, when I lived in the middle of nowhere, there would be lots of dead animals by, or dying animals by the side of the road when I was on my runs. So I would have to be like, usually if I was doing a long enough run, I'd have to do at least one euthanasia on the way. It's like, oh, fucking rabbit with his back legs crushed, you should probably take care of this.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  God, okay, yeah, that's an important part of your daily exercise regime. Take a life.

• 1:37Robert Evans?

  Is, yeah, euthanasia?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  When I was little, I had an outdoor cat, which we shouldn't have had, and here's why. There was one day I was like, something smelled weird in my yard and I found that my cat had like a, a massive like corpse pile. Like he had assembled. It was, it was really powerful.

• 1:58Robert Evans?

  He was making, he was making his own, uh, bone temple, like in the new, uh, 28 Years Later movie.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  I didn't understand at the time, but I was like, wow, he just did that because he loved me so much.

• 2:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he loves you so much. He wanted you to have all of the corpses you need, you know? And that's not, you know, how many, how many, uh, how many guys will do that for you, right? You know, that's why, that's why we have pets.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  That's the main problem. I haven't seen the, the movie yet. Is it like, I, all I've seen is like clickbait about it being like zombies with their cocks out. Is that accurate?

• 2:29Robert Evans?

  There's a lot of dicks, you know, when I heard that I was like, we're probably going to get one brief glimpse of a huge fucking monster hog. But no, they really, there's a lot of cock in, in the new 28 movie.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  I appreciate that they didn't undersell it. Okay.

• 2:44Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, there's, there's a, there's more, more dick than you're expecting. You know, maybe less dick than I would have preferred, but more than you're expecting for sure.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Okay, I will, I will go. I haven't seen the first two, uh, but I love coming in at movie three or four.

• 3:01Robert Evans?

  It's okay. You're not gonna, you know what a zombie movie is. It's set after a zombie apocalypse in England. That's all you need to know, right?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  It's like, there's, there's enough like a need for context in our day to day work. I'm like, I'm not trying to learn lore for fun.

• 3:15Robert Evans?

  No, no, you don't need to know. Other than, I guess in the 28 movies, the zombies aren't dead. They're just like people who have like a weird bloodborne illness. So they're still alive.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  So they're people with their cocks out.

• 3:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're people with their cocks out, but it's okay. They had a child on set, so all the dicks are fake. They're photorealistic, but they're fake. I don't know, but that's the way, that's the way movie law works, apparently. I was reading it because they were like, yeah, because we had, the, the main character's a kid. So there's always a kid on set, so we can't have any real dicks hanging out, but we can't have everyone wearing full-time photorealistic penises that are fake.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  This is why child stardom should be illegal. That is the weirdest role I've ever heard.

• 3:55Robert Evans?

  Look.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  They're like, no, you can't, you can't actually, that can't have been a traumatizing thing for you. The dicks weren't real, kid.

• 4:02Robert Evans?

  The dicks weren't real. Didn't you catch that they were fake cock? Like, it's so funny.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  It's just so like, an actor trying to like, comfort a child actor to be like, no, no, no, it's not real. And then pulling the fake dick off of your body. Like, how is it?

• 4:17Robert Evans?

  It's so funny.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  How did we get here? I know I'm distracted by the dying squirrel, but what is happening, people?

• 4:23Robert Evans?

  We're just talking about movies, Sophie, because we really don't want to talk about the subject of today's episode.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's awful. Oh, no. Okay.

• 4:33Robert Evans?

  Peter Hegseth.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Okay. I could have taken a worse turn.

• 4:37Robert Evans?

  You could have taken a worse turn? Yeah. I'd rather talk about zombie dicks than Pete Hegseth.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  That's true. I mean, Pete had Hegseth this bad. I was, I was worried that we were heading teal. But, but.

• 4:49Robert Evans?

  No, no, we've done teal. We've done teal.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was like, is there more?

• 4:53Robert Evans?

  No, you're good. You're good.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I'm not at the Peter Thiel addendum episode. Okay.

• 4:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, so, yeah, let's, uh, let's, let's get into it. I guess that's the cold open done. You're welcome for all the dick talk.

• 5:07Speaker 03

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• 5:12Robert Evans?

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• 6:13Speaker 05

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• 6:45Robert Evans?

  We're back.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Okay, well, now I'm nice and warm to be made less horny than I've ever been in my entire life. A guy committing war crimes in real time. What a thrill.

• 6:55Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna give you a mea culpa here. I had initially planned for this to just be a book episode, reading Pete Hegseth's terrible fascist book, American Crusade, which unfortunately, people do need to be aware of because he's the Secretary of Defense now. But then I wound up needing to give extra context and so there is, my initial thing was like, he's not really interesting enough for two episodes on the motherfucker, just as a person, he's not that interesting. But anyway, I wound up, it's kind of a hybrid book, BTB episode, so, you know, there's research here, there's also just a lot of chunks of his book that we'll be talking about because they matter. It's just a little bit of a weird episode, but I did it.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Okay. When did the book come out?

• 7:36Robert Evans?

  2020.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. American Crusade was his, like, election tie-in book. So, one of the funny things that you repeatedly come across is his dire warnings that, like, if the Republicans don't win in 2020, the whole country's over. Which, like, yeah, some of this has, like, not aged well, but it also, it's also a very, like, fascist Christian nationalist book that makes it very clear what kind of country Pete Hegseth wants to use his powers to, as Secretary of Defense, to further, right?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Because that's published, like, about midway through his, his run on Fox News, right?

• 8:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he starts in 2014, but he's just initially kind of a commentator. We'll talk about all that.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:21Robert Evans?

  Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of Defense, is, you know,

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Embarrassing, first of all. Thank you.

• 8:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And he writes in 2020, a manifesto slash book called American Crusade, which is one of those both like tie in, I'm trying to get more into politics. This is back when he was really fishing in the first Trump admin to be made SecDef. And there were still too many adults in the room at that point for him to get made Secretary of Defense. Because as his backstory that I'm going to give briefly, we'll make clear, this is not a man who's ever been reliable in a position of power. Right?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  I guess it never occurred to me that he could be.

• 8:57Robert Evans?

  No.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  I guess he's held down a job technically.

• 9:00Robert Evans?

  Not even really. No, not even really, actually. Unless you count Fox News as a job, but even that, not, not really.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:09Robert Evans?

  So Peter Hegseth was born on June 6th, 1980 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His dad was a- Yes. Yeah, he's a Minneapolis boy.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Sorry, already. Like, like all fascists, he's aging terribly.

• 9:20Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. No, he looks like shit. Yes.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 9:23Robert Evans?

  That's, that's kind of what happens when you drink the way Pete Hegseth drinks.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, fair enough. Wow. I would have guessed he's at least 10 years older.

• 9:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  I was like, is Jamie shocked at the Minneapolis of it all, the age?

• 9:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, I mean, it doesn't, it's, it's not, he's not like the most obvious Minneapolis guy, but I'm not shocked to hear that he's from Minneapolis. Right?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  That, that was not the shock. It was that he's under 50.

• 9:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's under 50, much younger than you'd expect.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:52Robert Evans?

  His dad was a basketball coach for high school, um, which, you know, he's, he's got son of a fucking high school coach energy for sure.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's how many crimes could be prevented if your, if daddy didn't bench you?

• 10:04Robert Evans?

  If daddy didn't bench you? Well, and here's the other thing. What's the only thing that a parent could be that's worse than a high school sports coach? And it's, his mom was an executive business coach.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 10:15Robert Evans?

  Even worse. Somehow they found a worse kind of coach to be.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  What does that even mean? That's like a made up job.

• 10:21Robert Evans?

  That means that you get paid like a mid-six-figure income for sitting in a room and going, oh, that's a good idea. Uh, that, that's, that's it, basically.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  That is boss who mis-curl.

• 10:32Robert Evans?

  Maybe lays some people off. I don't know. Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  It's a consultant.

• 10:36Robert Evans?

  That's what she does. Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I love. Yeah. It's like, like the job where at like, at the turn of the century, you'd be like, hey, have you considered firing people and replacing them with computers?

• 10:44Robert Evans?

  What if we fired some more people? What if we outsourced? And now they're all saying, what if AI? Right? Like, it's, it's just, it's just people who come from good families and have connections, but don't have any skills. That's the executive business coach community.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Okay, barely literate position.

• 10:58Robert Evans?

  And the consultant community, right? So his family, they have money and they have very strong conservative bona fides, right? Like his mom and dad are both very strong Republicans and politically involved. Pete graduates from the Forest Lake Area High School in 1999 as valedictorian. He is good at something at one point in his life. As an adult, he goes to Princeton, where he helps to run, and again, family money, where he helps to run the school's conservative newspaper. He's becomes editor eventually of like the right wing paper on campus. As editor, he like publishes a promise that he will defend Western civilization from, quote, "the distractions of diversity."

• 11:42Speaker 01

  It's so like, I, I know that they're everywhere. I'm aware that they're everywhere, but I'm still so disturbed by like, just the idea of a young, like a teenage Republican is such a bizarre image to me. It's like seeing a twin at age 60.

• 11:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  You don't want to imagine them that young.

• 12:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You don't, you don't want to, but you have to because they're there.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  There they are.

• 12:06Robert Evans?

  And it's what Pete's going to, he's going to try a couple of things in later in life. Like, he's initially kind of more on the Republican mainstream side of things that gets eaten up by Trump. So he has to, a big part of this book we're going to read is him like giving his mea culpa of like, oh, you know, I was a rhino. I was lost. And then I, I realized, you know, Donald Trump really was, you know, our brilliant savior and stuff.

• 12:30Robert Evans?

  And one of the points that I think his backstory makes is that he was always pretty extreme conservative. Like, the whole reason why he wouldn't have gotten behind Trump is that he didn't believe Trump was really a conservative until it became clear that Trump was going to win. But like, the, the weird right wing stuff, the hatred of diversity, that's been there his whole life. Like, he talks about himself as if he'd been apolitical as a young man, but he never really was.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Well, no, yeah, if he's the editor of the conservative Princeton paper.

• 12:58Robert Evans?

  He sure is. And yeah, that's just a bad group of people to exist. Under his guidance, the paper attacked Halle Berry for accepting an Oscar over her performance in Monsters Ball because it was racist.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 13:12Robert Evans?

  Against white people, I think. I don't know. I didn't feel the need to go and read that article. But yeah, that's the kind of like conservative paper this is. It's like, it's time to go to war with Halle Berry for her Oscar.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I imagine conservative papers like that are just like 90% vaguely racist editorials.

• 13:32Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  During his time as editor, Hegseth published another student's commentary mocking the school's policy that sex with an unconscious partner should count as rape. An article for The New Yorker cites Judd Legum's newsletter Popular Information when he summarized the article in Hegseth's paper this way. The commentary claimed that rape required both a failure to consent and duress, which a passed out woman couldn't experience. So, great guy, Pete. Yeah. Put a pin in that because we'll talk about some sex crimes he's accused of.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, he really, he really walks the walk in that regard. It's always so bizarre.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  Allegedly. Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Sure. It's so like, I don't know, the fact that you're thinking about doing that so much that you publish, like essentially intent is just like, it's mind blowing.

• 14:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The whole like, yeah, well, they can't be sad if they're unconscious. It's just like the darkest, evilest way to make that argument. It's somehow worse than like arguing like, oh no, they wanted it secretly. It's just like, oh, because they're unconscious? It doesn't, what the fuck, man? How do you write that and not burst into flames?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  I mean. Yeah.

• 14:47Robert Evans?

  So I can like tattoo you if you pass out drunk and that's legal, right? Cause you're not aware of it.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Because you're not right. That's just like, well, if you, if you're quote unquote asleep, anything that happens, it's like the international waters of consent. Like it's fucking crazy.

• 15:02Robert Evans?

  Insane. Yeah. If you, if you try to extend that anywhere else, it just becomes increasing. Like it's, it's just nuts.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and of course, like that, that rule wouldn't apply to him.

• 15:13Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no, no. If I, if you drew a dick on Pete Hegseth's face when he's passed out drunk in a Pentagon closet, you would get in trouble.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  He'd drone strike you.

• 15:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Drone strike your house.

• 15:21Robert Evans?

  He would try to. Um, so Pete is in short, exactly the kind of right wing dipshit you'd expect him to be as a kid, based on his current trajectory. He goes on to work in finance. He works for Bear Stearns. That's his first job out of college is fucking Bear Stearns.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Slay.

• 15:40Robert Evans?

  Great stuff. And he, he volunteers for the National Guard because nine 11 and he winds up, well, he gets into ROTC first when he's in college, but then he joins the National Guard as he's starting his fintech career. And after a year or so, I think his fintech career is interrupted when he deploys to Iraq. So he does a tour there, which we will talk about later. This comes up in the book, so I'll talk a little, I'll talk more about Hegseth's military career in that portion. But after doing his tour, he winds up back in New York where he's just kind of like, then this is not an uncommon thing. He does see combat, a lot of combat vets. When they come back, like the things really get bad for them, you know? Not when they're over there, not when they're in the ship, when you wind up like just kind of locking yourself alone in an apartment.

• 16:25Robert Evans?

  And yeah, he starts drinking very heavily. Again, not an uncommon story. He feels aimless and eventually solves this by taking a job. Initially, he's like volunteering as an assistant director at Vets for Freedom, which is a 501(c)(4) group that he ultimately comes to lead as the paid director of the organization.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  It's too bad, cause while he was in New York, he could have just like gone to see Rent on Broadway.

• 16:49Robert Evans?

  He could have gone to see Rent. He could have developed a fatal addiction to heroin, you know?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  You, you know, like he could have seen a lot.

• 16:56Robert Evans?

  Broadway, you know, just quietly slip away, you know?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Pete, just go see Billy Elliot, you know, have a wine spritzer, call it a day.

• 17:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, yours is nicer than mine, but sure. So this is like a very political 501(c)(4) in like a shitty way. They spend millions of dollars doing a PR campaign to support the surge in Iraq. They spend another several million attacking Barack Obama's candidacy. So this is like a right wing vets org. And despite the fact that he winds up running it, he is awful at this job. It is a disaster for the VFF. He runs up massive debts. He like takes them into the red.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Doing what?

• 17:37Robert Evans?

  Well, part of it is, you know, they're carrying out these massive PR campaigns. But part of it is that he treats the organization's bank account allegedly like a personal party fund. Right? Like he's spending it, he's traveling, he's doing a lot of drinking and partying. A lot of people are, right?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:52Robert Evans?

  There's allegations and we'll hear more allegations about the next org that he's involved in.

• 17:58Robert Evans?

  But yeah, this does not go well and he's kind of, his tenure is disastrous for the VFF.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is all in the mid 2000s?

• 18:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the mid aughts. 2008 is when he got married in like 2004 and 2008, his first wife files for divorce after he admits to cheating on her repeatedly. Once with a journalist he'd introduced to her.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so he gets left a couple of years later or forced out of VFF. You'll hear both things, either that he left or that he's forced out. Anyway, he's gone from VFF.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Get divorced by his job, that's so sad.

• 18:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and he attempts to run for senate in Minnesota, which we will talk about later. It doesn't work, right? He's bad at this. So since he's failed at everything else, he volunteers for another tour in Afghanistan. He does another tour in Afghanistan, he's promoted to major. He comes back to the US and in 2012, he forms a PAC to help like minded conservative candidates. Per the New Yorker, according to a report by American Public Media, a third of the funds in Hegseth's PAC were spent on parties for his friends and family and less than half was spent on candidates. So he has a.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  It sucks because it was like, like, I'm not against this money being misused for parties.

• 19:08Robert Evans?

  It's much better than if it's used appropriately, right? Because it's a shitty organization, they both are, right?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, like it should, you know, it should be spent on fancy food and alcohol, but.

• 19:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  It's also, it's just extremely funny to me. Like, yeah, he now has a pattern and it's either start or get, you know, promoted to leading a charitable organization and then spend its money getting hammered. Like, cool as hell. Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  So is he like, is he, so 2012, is this like Tea Party era? Like, who is, who is he running with? Who's his crowd?

• 19:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tea Party, Tea Party is, has started a couple of years ago at this point.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, in the late aughts.

• 19:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So this is like, that's all happening at this stage. And he's, when he loses his candidacy, it's to like the Ron Paul organization backed candidate because he's like, he's still too much establishment neo con. You know, he's a Bush conservative at this point, which we used to see is extreme, but oh, how the turn have tabled.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Now they're just widow guys.

• 20:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Now they're just widow guys. Yeah.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  He's got, look at, I mean, I don't know. I feel like you, some people, not to put him in a box.

• 20:20Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's fine.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  But let's do it.

• 20:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, fuck it. Fuck him.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Something about like, guys that have like, their, it looks like their hair is just like welded to their head. You're like, I don't trust.

• 20:30Robert Evans?

  Shellacked on there.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Like whatever product, not, I mean, I know he comes by being a fascist, honestly, but also you have to imagine some chemicals are seeping into the scalp there with the, what with the hair being welded directly on his scalp.

• 20:43Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no. They're getting in, that's, that's what happened to Rudy Giuliani, right? He, he had the same hair care routine as Pete Hegseth and a lot of it leaked out of him, you know?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:51Robert Evans?

  And when he lost his goo, that's when he started losing all those lawsuits. The goo was what was protecting him from the lawsuits.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. The goo is protecting him from being tricked into being in Borat 2, a load in more ways than one.

• 21:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that was load bearing goo.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Brutal.

• 21:05Robert Evans?

  Jesus Christ, I forgot that happened. Fucking Giuliani.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Oh my God. This bitch will do anything.

• 21:13Robert Evans?

  We'll need to do an episode onto him when it's time for us to like, when, when everyone's morale is even lower and we really need, we need a win, like a happy episode.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's just like no failure like there's it's fun. It's fun to do an episode where there's just no shortage of elves sprinkled between their crimes.

• 21:29Robert Evans?

  It's nothing but elves.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Who was he? Was he the saddest person we saw at the RNC or was it the was it MyPillowGuy?

• 21:37Robert Evans?

  He was MyPillowGuy was sadder because Giuliani at least like I had a nice fight with Rudy Giuliani. And like I did enjoy the fact that like unlike every other major figure there that you would like try to engage, they were too PR trained and too smart to really want to get into it with some journalists. But Rudy was gonna be like, oh yeah, let's fucking brawl.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  What did you fight with Rudy about?

• 21:58Robert Evans?

  About Ukraine. We had like, we published an episode, It Could Happen Here about it. But like, yeah, we had like a fucking 10 or 15 minute like.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  He was just hanging around the like radio.

• 22:08Robert Evans?

  Because he wasn't welcome in the real convention.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he wasn't in the main part. Yeah.

• 22:12Robert Evans?

  But yeah, I mean, and he was bored as hell.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  God, they should do a sequel to the James Wood Rudy Giuliani movie.

• 22:21Robert Evans?

  Oh, God, I forgot that existed. Holy shit. Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  I know.

• 22:26Robert Evans?

  Back when he was America's mayor. Fuck me.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a very sincere movie.

• 22:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's sincerely stupid as shit.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Called America's mayor?

• 22:37Robert Evans?

  No, I mean, that's what we it might be, but that's what we called Rudy. Growing up as a conservative like.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  James Woods would be down for round two.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  I like that city that's got a dog for a mayor.

• 22:48Robert Evans?

  I think, yeah, I don't think mayor should be legal, or I think we should, I think we should have like, you know, some of those cultures that would like ritualistically kill their leaders. That's what we should do to mayors. It should be built into the legal system that we have like a wicker man after every mayor's term expense.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  That's Santa University rules. At the end, you.

• 23:07Robert Evans?

  Santa University rules.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  You get one year tenure of Santa and then you're publicly executed.

• 23:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think that we that's that's how we should that. That's like when we we write our new constitution. That's how our elected leaders should work. Yeah, we're now doing a wicker man for everybody.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Oh, you care? What are you willing to put on the line?

• 23:27Robert Evans?

  You were a great alderman. Unfortunately, your year's up.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  At every level.

• 23:32Robert Evans?

  At every level. The fucking school board. Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  The comptroller. I'm like, sorry, brother.

• 23:38Robert Evans?

  Look, would it be a good system? No. Would it work better than our current system? Maybe.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Look, I think it's worth a shot.

• 23:45Robert Evans?

  Perhaps.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  I think it's worth a shot. And it would really bring people together for particular individuals.

• 23:51Robert Evans?

  Speaking of things that bring people together, Jamie, the products and services that support this podcast.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  I love to gather around a good product or service with my loved ones.

• 24:01Robert Evans?

  Gather around, be warmed by it, right? Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Just like the corpse of a squirrel.

• 24:06Robert Evans?

  Like the corpse of a squirrel.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  God damn it, guys.

• 24:13Robert Evans?

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• 25:13Robert Evans?

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• 26:24Robert Evans?

  We're back. Sophie is still not happy.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Can you see it from your window?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  No, not from, not from where I am, but.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  But I can.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  That's probably for the best.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  But I can see it in here.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Elizabeth.

• 26:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  I forgot you named the squirrel.

• 26:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, she was a Fulbright scholar, Sophie.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Jesus, fuck. She had a huge future ahead of her. This is really sad.

• 26:48Robert Evans?

  It's, it's very tragic. Yeah. Um, speaking of things that are tragic, the fact that Pete Hegseth exists.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  The fact that Pete Hegseth, end of sentence.

• 26:58Robert Evans?

  In 2014, Hegseth started making appearances on Fox News. And he was initially, he was like a pinch hitter, right? He was, he didn't have a show. He would come and he'd be a talking head on segments, right? He's a veteran. He leads a veterans organization.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  He's the podcast guest of television.

• 27:12Robert Evans?

  Right. He's doing that for a while off and on. And, you know, he's, he's, he's got whatever Fox likes, right? He's, uh, he's, he's enough like of a, okay, this, this guy is what our audience considers like a straight laced looking military man. So yeah, we'll throw him in whenever we, we need somebody.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  The helmet hair. It's the, I feel like everyone at Fox News has the same lukewarm soup they bring to lunch.

• 27:36Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Lukewarm soup and brown alcohol.

• 27:38Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah. That, that, that's precisely right. And for Hegseth, it's basically all brown liquor. So he helps to lead. He also, in this time, he gets hired to lead another veterans organization, CVA, or the Concerned Veterans for America. So here he exhibits the same kind of incompetence and corruption that had seen him pushed out of the VFF. He was in fact-

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Parties?

• 28:03Robert Evans?

  So bad. Oh, Jamie, not just parties. It's, there's so much about how bad he is at this job. There is an internal whistleblower report that's commissioned about his three-year tenure leading the organization. I'm going to read a summary from an article in The New Yorker of like what this report reveals. "The detailed seven-page report, which was compiled by multiple former CVA employees and sent to the organization's senior management in February 2015, states that at one point Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization's female staffers, who they divided into two groups: the party girls and the not-party girls.

• 28:48Robert Evans?

  In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth's leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth's staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting, 'Kill a Muslim.'"

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 29:19Robert Evans?

  Cool guy.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 29:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  It's shocking he found time for all of that, first of all.

• 29:25Robert Evans?

  I do, most of that's not enjoyable, but it is funny to me how often the words "Louisiana strip club" show up in this article on Pete Hegseth.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  You can learn so much. I mean, and, and, and did he tip? That's something-

• 29:38Robert Evans?

  No, there's no way. There's no- Single way, Sophie.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 29:42Robert Evans?

  Or Jamie, sorry.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  We are one.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  It's an honor. It's an honor.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  We are one. Thank you.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  We are one. It's, that's miserable. I mean, there, this is the way that a person acts when they can't live with themselves.

• 29:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  If nothing else, but there, I mean, there's just so many levels there because it's like the, in one way, he's engaging in this very, I don't know, like this very fraternity, but also sorority behavior. Like the party girls versus non-party girls sounds like some Regina George shit. Like, that's just bizarre.

• 30:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's just gross dude stuff, right? Like, we got the party girls that we hire because, you know, you hire them because you want to fuck them, right? Like, that's, that's what's going on in this group.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:23Robert Evans?

  That's his management style.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  And it's, and it's rich that he thinks he could, uh, like, you know, weed out a competent employee from a non-competent one, given the fact that he seems like unable to do a single job that he has.

• 30:35Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. Well, because again, it's all about just getting drunk and partying, right? And sexually harassing slash assaulting your colleagues and racism.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Right. So he's, he's a racist molester.

• 30:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So he gets, he gets allegedly, he gets kicked out in 2016. Uh, there are, we have in the record, a bunch of celebratory emails from his former colleagues being like, thank God that guy's out, right? One of these messages includes the claim that he quote, "Treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account for partying, drinking and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to hook up with women on the road."

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 31:10Robert Evans?

  Cool guy. So that's his third job, his third organization that he's been shit canned from for massive corruption, right?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Blowing through them. Yeah.

• 31:19Robert Evans?

  He's just, he's tearing through these fucking things. I guess he doesn't get kicked out of the second because he starts it.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Are these mostly like lateral moves? Is he like moving his way up the ranks in any way? Or is this, are these mostly just lateral?

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  He's moving his way up at Fox. He's, he's getting more prominent within the conservative sphere. Because again, there's never any accountability to these guys, but like his former colleagues at these veterans organizations, even though they're all a lot conservative, are like, this guy absolutely should never have any job with any responsibility. He's the worst.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Well, Fox in 2016. And it's all but like required that you have some, some priors at being a sex pest.

• 31:56Robert Evans?

  You have the literal devil in your blood. Yes.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:59Robert Evans?

  Uh, in 2017, during a Flag Day event hosted by Fox, Hegseth threw an axe and accidentally hit and injured a US Military Academy drummer, causing serious injuries. There's a lawsuit over this. He claims long-term damage.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  So why was he throwing an axe?

• 32:13Robert Evans?

  There's like axe throwing going on, you know, it's like a, like the, like the kind of hobby thing and he's just shit at it because he sucks at everything. And he hits this drummer boy?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  If you give an addict an axe, you know?

• 32:25Robert Evans?

  It's so funny. It's so funny.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  God, did the drummer at least get a book deal?

• 32:31Robert Evans?

  No, no, I think there's a settlement probably, but no, he, he doesn't get shit because again, we don't, as, as, as Americans, look, you celebrate the person who throws axes, not the person who's dumb enough to get hit by an axe because they happen to be doing their job and don't expect that the future Secretary of Defense will hurl an axe at them.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Wow. Victim blaming our, our nation's great percussionists. How could you?

• 32:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm always, look, you know, this is the only time I'll be on Hegseth's side, but if the other thing is a band kid, I gotta.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Jealous, jealous.

• 33:06Robert Evans?

  Anti-band kid action.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  I pull out my oboe case, start shaking it.

• 33:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, of course it was an oboe.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Hey, hey, hey. Okay, first of all, first of all. No, he's, Sophie, unfortunately, he's right. I need to take that. I need to take.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  He's not allowed to choose. I'm on your side. No.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  You're right. You're right. I have to, oboes are a big bisexual indicator historically. It's just true.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Histor- that's just, that's history. Oboe players sound off in the chat.

• 33:41Robert Evans?

  There we go. There we go. The obo- oboe nation is gonna fucking sound off.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  It's literally, I think it's like oboe, playing the oboe and like getting really into a series of unfortunate events or major millennial, uh, yeah.

• 33:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Bisexual indicators. Who can say why?

• 33:57Robert Evans?

  Who can say why?

• 33:58Speaker 02

  You're just saying that because those were your only hobby.

• 34:03Robert Evans?

  Some Jamie lore.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Dozens of us.

• 34:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's gonna be a whole thread in the subreddit with like 900 replies about this.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're unionizing as we speak.

• 34:13Robert Evans?

  Everybody who felt weird reading the series of unfortunate event novels and yeah, played an oboe or some kind of reed instrument.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  So many crush options. Wow.

• 34:21Robert Evans?

  So, his career at Fox goes a lot better than his career leading, you know, these organizations. He becomes an official co-host in January of 2017, just as Trump begins his term. And he is able to get this job because he starts having sex with, initially, I think it's, I'm not sure, no, he would have been divorced by now. Anyway, he winds up marrying the Fox producer, Jennifer Roche, who keeps putting him on the air. And I think she's his third wife, maybe a second. He has three, he's been divorced like three times. So, great guy. Anyway, he hooks up with this Fox producer who keeps putting him on the air. And so he bounces around a few different shows, he's on regularly, and he kind of makes a point

• 35:03Robert Evans?

  of just taking whatever is the most radical take that will earn him Trump's attention. It's just kind of like, I'm gonna be a shameless bootlicker on Fox, because he watches Fox habitually, and so I want him to see me repeatedly being nice to him, right?

• 35:17Robert Evans?

  And he's doing this to campaign to become the Secretary of Defense, which he can't manage during Trump's first term, because Trump is still listening to a couple of adults a little too much, who are like, I don't know, the guy who can't even run a fucking NGO without spending all of the money on hookers and blow, probably shouldn't be running the army. We have a lot more money. There's a lot better.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Sir, there's far better sex criminals to run that department.

• 35:43Robert Evans?

  We can find you a sex criminal, don't worry, you know?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  We're aware of what needs to happen.

• 35:49Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah. So, as part of his ongoing attempt to both identify himself with the ascendant Christian nationalist movement and to force Trump to take note of him, in 2020, he publishes the book, American Crusade, right? Which is what, you know, kind of the core of our episodes this week are going to be about. So, let's get into that wonderful book, American Crusade, a nice innocuous title. So, I suppose first off, it's not surprising that this book starts off with a dedication to his family, and his kids primarily, and his kids have basically-

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Do his wives really want to hear from him?

• 36:25Robert Evans?

  They have the names you'd expect. You get to guess, guess one of the names.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  I mean, before we start, should we show Jamie the fucking cover?

• 36:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, let's, let's show Jamie the cover. Why not? Why not?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Hit me with the cover.

• 36:37Robert Evans?

  Jim, you want to describe that to our listeners on, uh, who are listening? Because it's a podcast and you shouldn't watch it on video. Hello, video listeners. We love you.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  We love you so much. Stop looking at us.

• 36:48Robert Evans?

  Stop looking at us, you freaks.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  I'm guessing, okay, let me guess. Uh, Chase, Griffin, uh, Nathaniel?

• 37:01Robert Evans?

  Hmm. Damn, Jamie. No, no, that's a bunch of big, big L's. Yeah, no. First one, which you should have gotten, Gunner.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:10Robert Evans?

  You should have, you should have gotten Gunner.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Oh, Gunner, uh, Bamo and...

• 37:18Robert Evans?

  Gunner, Jackson, Peter Boone. And that's the one he gives two names for. So I'm guessing his first name is Peter Boone? Kinsey, Luke, Rex and Gwyndolin.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And Lil Nuke.

• 37:31Robert Evans?

  Lil Nuke. Gunner and Rex are really sending me.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Wow, Gunner, coming in hot.

• 37:38Robert Evans?

  Good stuff, man. I'm surprised there's not a Hunter in there.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  That's, yeah, Hunter, that's okay. That, that I might have gotten to Hunter. This cover is, is...

• 37:47Robert Evans?

  It's nuts. So he's like...

• 37:49Speaker 01

  That can't be his body. That's not his body.

• 37:52Robert Evans?

  He, I mean, if he's on enough tested trend, sure. I'm sure he's taken steroids, you know?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I, I'm really struggling with like the, the neck to head ratio.

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  If that is his body.

• 38:04Robert Evans?

  Shopping going down there. You can see a big We the People tattoo on his forearm. He's like waving a flag. It's just like the dip shittiest cover.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  The angle of the We the People tattoo only makes sense in the context of this picture. Like if he, if this, that was normally the angle it was at, it would be crooked. But that's what, but, but this is clearly AI. This is, I, this is, this is not, this is, this is clearly real.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  This is not his body, but there's, there's things that were done here.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  But I appreciate the, I would love to see him actually try to do this.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  At the top of it, it says, and quote, Pete pulls no punches with this book.

• 38:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Sean Hannity.

• 38:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Nice. It's always, it's always fun with this stuff because you're like, there's no way Sean Hannity wrote this book. But then in some ways, there's no way that Pete Hegseth wrote this book. Do you think he could, it was ghostwritten or do you think he wrote it?

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Let's, let's, let's let Robert read some and then we'll give our opinions.

• 39:01Robert Evans?

  I think he, he does write, you know, he's got this editorial position. He definitely writes some of it. I suspect it's a thing where it gets like, you know, massaged by a real writer, but there's a lot of it that seems very Pete, right? In fact, the opening after he lists his kids' names, uh, he gives a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, right? Every chapter opens with a quote from a great American, usually Donald Trump, but this one's Theodore Roosevelt. There is not room in the country for any 50/50 American, nor can there be but one loyalty to the stars and stripes, right? Which, you know, I might say that, well, if your loyalty is to your weird interpretation of Christianity over the Constitution, you know, maybe you're not 100% anyway, whatever.

• 39:43Robert Evans?

  That's not how he sees it. So here's how the chapter opens. Our American Crusade, Chapter One. Take a moment to consider your part in the miracle of the 2016 election, the history we made as sons and daughters of freedom. For the left that humiliating defeat strengthened their resolve to achieve their ultimate goal, erasing America's soul, culture, and institutions, we are the ones standing in their way and have been targeted for annihilation.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Wow. I like that he adds it a little, he's like, on top of being a motherfucking piece of, he's, he's also kind of bitchy. He's like, I'm praying for my haters. I'm praying for all my haters on the left.

• 40:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, no, he's not praying for them. He, he is, this is a book about how we need to kill the left, right? That is, that is his, and like every allegation here is an admission, right? That like, because he's constantly talking, the left wants to kill us all, they want to wipe us all out. That's why we have to have total victory against them, right? It's a, like, it's, it's this, you know, there, there is. Bad as we are, so we have to do to them what we wanted to do to them anyway, but we can pretend we're defending ourselves, right?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, they're even worse. We gotta get them first.

• 40:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he goes on to claim that we, the people, we all feel that, quote, "The other side, the left, is not our friend. We are not esteemed colleagues, nor mere political opponents." And I think this part is valuable. I think there's some of this that I really would like to shove in the hands of like, especially a lot of elected Democrats, because Hegseth very neatly sweeps away the claims that are made by guys like Biden, that like, "Well, there's good Republicans. We gotta work with them. You know, we need a strong Republican Party. It's just, you know, some of this MAGA stuff, we gotta dust off it, but like, it's good to have strong conservatives in government with us." And Hegseth is making the point that, no, like, there's no conservatives that you can trust, because we, the left, like, we are not esteemed colleagues, and we're not political opponents. We want to

• 41:28Robert Evans?

  destroy you. You can't work with us, right? And that's, that is the truth about modern conservatism, about the Republican Party. You can't work with them, right? They've made it clear. It should be obvious, but a lot of mainstream Democrats refuse to fucking believe it.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  No, no, no, they're just, yeah, I mean, well, best of luck with that project, because it feels like if there's one thing mainstream Democrats aren't gonna do, it's read a direct threat against them and take it seriously.

• 41:55Robert Evans?

  Right, right. And there are direct threats in here. Hegseth goes on to say, "We are foes. Either we win or they win. We agree on nothing else."

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:04Robert Evans?

  Maybe treat them like that, guys, you know? That's what they're saying.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  No, no, no, they just, they, we need to empathize. We need empathy with these guys.

• 42:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm done with that. I was raised these guys. I don't have empathy for me when I was this kind of person. Like, I suck. So Pete goes on to brag that the US has the top economy and military, but that our cultural and educational institutions, America's soul, have succumbed to leftist rot. And even a once-in-a-generation electoral miracle like 2016 won't be enough to save us, which is funny considering how 2024 went down. A lot of this book is like, darkly funny in light of the fact that they won in 2024 and lost in 2020. So Pete says that our future existence as sons and daughters of freedom can only happen if, after the, quote, "Categorical defeat of the left." Thus, this time in our

• 42:57Robert Evans?

  history calls for, in all caps, "American crusade. Yes, a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom."

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Wow, title drop, title mentioned.

• 43:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, good stuff.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  I like that he put it in caps, just in case it wasn't clear.

• 43:10Robert Evans?

  You gotta put, you gotta put it in caps. You gotta put it in caps.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  I mean, the rhetoric is like, I guess, kind of what I would expect. Does he get specific? Is there, does he, is the book about the plan?

• 43:23Robert Evans?

  I mean, kind of. Pete's not a great planning guy. He's not a great knowing how to, he's, you know, not going to be a great war leader guy for that reason.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Step one, allocate one third of the budget to parties for me.

• 43:34Robert Evans?

  There's some of that, but it's mainly about getting, it's mainly about like getting everybody like riled up for an existential battle that he believes 2020 was going to be, right? Like this, this crusade of, you know, it's trying to get people on the side of extermination, right? Hegseth then directly cites the first crusade as his example of what we need to return to. He describes the first crusade as happening 1,000 years ago after years of Christians or Europeans ceding land to Muslim whores. The Pope finally got around to declaring a crusade in order to save Europe and his knights marched to war under the cry Deus Volit, or God Wills It. Now, I should interject here because Pete has a Deus Volit tattoo and this is a meaningful

• 44:19Robert Evans?

  term on the far right and the neo-Nazi right, right? Now, to interject here, first off, all of the history here is nonsense, right? Like, his, his history of the Crusades is not accurate. The Guardian interviewed Matthew-

• 44:31Speaker 01

  That was my question. I was like, this does, this isn't sounding right.

• 44:33Robert Evans?

  That, that's, we're gonna talk about that first.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:36Robert Evans?

  The Guardian interviewed Matthew Gabriel, who's a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech, and he pointed out, "There were absolutely no incursions to mainland Europe. If anything, Islam was kind of on the retreat in Iberia and other places as well. So there was no large geopolitical shift or any kind of immediate threat of Islam taking over Europe." Right? Like, they were not, in fact, on the defensive when the Crusades started.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Well, that doesn't sound good and it doesn't serve his point. This is just another reminder that in mainstream publishing, fact checking is not an allocated part of the budget.

• 45:07Robert Evans?

  No, it's not. You gotta do that as the author.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Crazy to me.

• 45:10Robert Evans?

  They don't give a shit anymore.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  You gotta pay out of pocket if you want- That shit.

• 45:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, not because there's no money in being accurate.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, books wouldn't sell as well.

• 45:20Robert Evans?

  So Pete is not at all alone in taking Deus Vult on as a rallying cry. White supremacists have used it as a catchphrase for years now. And he's mainly noteworthy for being the most prominent political figure in the country to do so. After the first Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which is the first time many reporters and regular Americans saw the phrase in use by Nazis and other white supremacist marchers. Outlets like NPR published interviews with experts like Medieval Academy of America head Lisa Davis, who pointed out that Europe during the Crusade period was not white. And that far right marchers at Charlottesville adorned themselves with symbols like that of Saint Maurice, who was regularly featured on Crusader livery and was himself an Egyptian man. Right? That like even a lot of these things that they're like, we were all white, like this, this beautiful saint that the Crusaders marched under.

• 46:05Robert Evans?

  My father was born in Egypt, like that, that is simply an African man, like.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Insane. I mean, I'm like, is this just like people, a group of people, I mean, obviously just brain dead people. But like, I think about how many older movies and then also movies I grew up on that essentially portray Egyptian people as white. Or at best, Italian looking.

• 46:25Robert Evans?

  It's in part because like they're in, yeah, I mean, one, one reality of it is that everyone in the Mediterranean basin looks more Mediterranean than like they do anything else, right? Once you get right up to the like, because there's a lot of interchange between those cultures, right? And the other thing is that at this period of time, whiteness doesn't exist as a concept, right? If you were to go back, like think about it, go back to the Roman Empire and tell them like, this guy is not as much of a person to you because of their skin color. They'd be like, what are you talking about? This guy's less of a person because he's not a Roman, like that, that's what matters.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  You're like, make, make no mistake, this man is not a person to me, but not for the reasons you think.

• 47:00Robert Evans?

  For that reason, no, he's less human than me because he was born in a different place.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  It is fascinating watching, yeah, just like how. Everything needs to serve like his thesis, but and it really doesn't matter.

• 47:14Robert Evans?

  It just doesn't. None of it, none of it works out. And none of these people actually know anything about the Crusades, right?

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Well, and the problem is, yeah, like, I'm glad that there were like medieval scholars that like corrected the record, but his followers don't care.

• 47:26Robert Evans?

  No, and it doesn't matter. I'm doing this in part because like, yeah, this is, that's the kind of episode that this is, right? Where you go through this and you're like, all right, what's accurate, what's not. But like, this doesn't, like, no one listening to this was like coming in as a Pete Hegseth fan because of the Crusade stuff. And it's going to be like, my God, he was wrong. Like, that's just not the way.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  This changes everything for me. I wonder if there's one person. Yeah.

• 47:47Robert Evans?

  Now, I should also note here that, because he uses Deus Volta, he's got it tattooed on his body because he believes it was the rallying cry that Crusaders marched to war under during the First Crusade. This is very likely to be untrue, right? This is actually the result of propaganda that came later. Marburg historian George Strack has pointed out to the Catholic news agency that Pope Urban II, who declared the First Crusade, never used the phrase Deus Volta himself and quote, "Only one chronicle, that of Robert the monk, which was written around 10 years after the Pope's call to crusade at a synod in Clermont, France, quotes the exclamation at all," Strack explained. "The author was aware from another chronicle that the Northern French Crusaders used Deus Volta as a war cry or a sign of recognition among themselves.

• 48:29Robert Evans?

  Robert's aim was to present the crusade as a divine and papally led project, which is why he claimed that Urban II had heard the war cry Deus Volta in Clermont and approved of it. From the historian's point of view, however, this is implausible. Even Robert's medieval contemporaries would have placed little trust in the chronicler. It was only under the humanists of the 15th century that the monks rhetoric received favorable attention again. They found Robert's chronicle plausible, and so the war cry Deus Volta was quoted very frequently from then on. And soon the other reports about Urban's call from Clermont were forgotten, says Strack. So this is probably propaganda from the beginning that there's not much evidence of at the time, that no one would have taken very seriously at the time, that 500 years later, like, you know, chuds adopt, 1500s chuds, right?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Never trust a Robert. That's what I always say.

• 49:14Robert Evans?

  Never trust a Robert. That's the core of history, of historiography.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Spewing lies.

• 49:19Robert Evans?

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• 49:30Speaker 01

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• 49:32Robert Evans?

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• 49:34Speaker 02

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• 49:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, the sports betting people are honest, right? You'll go broke, but they're honest.

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• 49:43Robert Evans?

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• 49:50Robert Evans?

  Ah, drugs.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Jesus, Robert.

• 49:54Robert Evans?

  What?

• 49:57Robert Evans?

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• 50:57Robert Evans?

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• 52:08Robert Evans?

  We're back. So for the sake of morale, it might be good for us to recall here that the Crusades were not successes in the traditional military sense of the word. The first crusade did have some initial victories and resulted in temporary Christian control of parts of the Holy Land, but this did not last long. By 1187, less than 100 years, the great general Saladin had surrounded Jerusalem, right? The long train of disasters for organized Christian militaries during the Crusades led to a surge in support for maniac cult leaders like Peter the Hermit, who gathered an army of starving hermits to march on the Holy Land. Andrew Curry writes, quote, "Peter's success was cited over and over again in the years to come. The defeat suffered by better organized Crusades led many to believe

• 52:50Robert Evans?

  that it was the humble who were destined to succeed, not the proud, rich military classes. In the end, these people's Crusades ended in disaster, too. None ever reached the Holy Land, and most of the peasant Crusaders were either slaughtered as they plundered their way across Europe or disbanded before ever reaching a port. Without the resources to reach the Holy Land, most turned on more conventional targets, namely Europe's Jewish communities. Why are we going to seek out our profanity and to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites for our Messiah when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him, was the rationale, as recorded by a Jewish eyewitness." Again, most of the real Crusades, a large chunk of the real Crusaders didn't even crusade. They just went and murdered Jews, right? In Europe, yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, okay, do we think?

• 53:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Pete Hegseth knows any of this?

• 53:38Robert Evans?

  No, I don't think he really reads much.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  I am genuinely curious.

• 53:42Robert Evans?

  I don't think it would matter. He would just wouldn't trust any account you told him if it's different from what he already believes.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Right. That's, I mean, I didn't, I don't know this about the Crusades. I'm not, I gotta say, I'm not a Crusades head.

• 53:54Robert Evans?

  Well, the gist of it, and this is a quote from Medieval Studies Professor Matthew Gabriel, "The Crusaders lost. They lost everything."

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Well, maybe an American crusade, not too bad an idea.

• 54:06Robert Evans?

  Watch the documentary Kingdom of Heaven for more.

• 54:11Robert Evans?

  Still holds up. Banger of a film. So again, none of this stuff works as a gotcha, right? You're not going to convince anyone to change their politics by being like, actually, the crusades sucked, right?

• 54:24Robert Evans?

  But I do think it's valuable to look at this history for our own edification. As a reminder that this too shall pass and that these kinds of people never managed to win the way they think they will in the long run because they suck at shit. But also, the mere fact that they've doomed themselves doesn't mean that they won't cause even more suffering in their failures, right? Those people's crusades were all disasters, but a lot of Jewish communities suffered as a result, right?

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:50Robert Evans?

  Anyway, let's continue with Pete. He goes from the crusades to the American Revolution, probably the only periods in history that he's taken a passing interest in. He notes that like crusaders and patriots past, the red MAGA hat is a symbol for the need for violent action to secure liberty. Only by going on offense against a left that surrounds them can conservatives survive. Now, the fact that this is written in the run up to 2020 and the fact that that election went against them should say a few things to you, right? We know now this was not the decisive or the last battle, but Hegseth writes as if it was and that the left would cause total annihilation if they won in 2020. He notes that while there are millions of patriots, the country also houses hordes

• 55:33Robert Evans?

  of people who don't share their allegiance and that their ignorance and ideologies threaten national survival.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:40Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, again, like, the language here is very unsparing and this is how most of them think. You can't, again, it's just important that Democrats understand, you can't talk it out with someone like this. They're not willing to talk to you.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Right, and I mean, that's like their, that's their whole thing. It is interesting, anytime you hear, I mean, I guess you hear it. Basically every day now, but but over time, I think in the last 10 years where you just hear the us versus them in in an increasingly upward line to the point where he's just like straightforwardly saying they're like the people who agree with me are Americans.

• 56:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  And the people who don't aren't.

• 56:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, which is like, I mean,

• 56:22Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Continued in that direction.

• 56:24Robert Evans?

  Thanks, Pete.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 56:25Robert Evans?

  Uh, so the next section of his book is about the two Americas, which he describes as America and the left. And in order to highlight this, he gives us the story of two different immigrants, both named Omar. Uh, Samara Omar, who was an Iraqi who fought with Hegseth. Uh, he was an interpreter after the US invasion and later immigrated to the US legally. The other Omar is of course Ilhan Omar, who he calls the Somali Omar.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Oh, leave her out of it.

• 56:52Robert Evans?

  Oh, no, he's he is. This is, I mean, this is like peak Ilhan Omar brain worms, period, 2020. Um, now that it's much less now.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  I feel like it's still got worse in 23.

• 57:02Robert Evans?

  It's still pretty bad. It's still bad. Like, it's just, there's, it's more of a topic of discussion, I guess.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 57:08Robert Evans?

  Um, maybe just there's less.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  A tale of two Omars. Good lord.

• 57:11Robert Evans?

  It's nuts. Uh, his attitude is the common one you'll see on the right, that Ilhan was graciously led into this country and has done nothing but spit in its face. I don't think we really need to deal with this point, save to note that even in the America of 2025, even someone like Pete's, you know, interpreter Omar, who fought alongside US soldiers, aren't qualified to stay here. Earlier this year, the United States revoked special status to Afghan people who helped the United States in its war against the Taliban. Per MSNBC, the Trump administration told them, quote, "That they've got to self-deport by May 20th back to a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. If America can't honor its word to those who bled for it, a retired US Colonel told me, why would anyone trust us again? This isn't just immigration policy, it's a test of our moral credibility, and we're failing." Now, Jamie.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:57Robert Evans?

  I've seen the US in enough war zones and talked to enough people who believed in our promises to them when they fought alongside us, that I can say, there's no point in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone listening to this show, in which we had moral credibility, or we're trustworthy friends, right?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Well, it's like, we're also recording this at a time-

• 58:13Robert Evans?

  What period of time are you talking about?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  We're also recording this at a time where, again, like, both of his examples are people who could just get plucked off of the street and kidnapped by ICE. Like, citizenship has nothing to do with it.

• 58:25Robert Evans?

  Well, again, that's part of what's interesting about the timing this comes in, is that in 2020, even as like, a Pete Hegseth Republican, you still had to pretend that you were like, okay with multiculturalism, as long as they were pro-American, right? That like, no, this Iraqi interpreter of mine is a great American, he's fully integrated, right? He gets to stay here, because he did all the right things. And as soon as they got into power, like, oh, actually, no, we don't give a shit, all that matters is your skin color, right? Like, and that's the reality, right? Under the regime that has given Pete Hegseth power.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:54Robert Evans?

  But he spends a lot of his book talking about the Omar who fought with him, who he calls Texas Omar now, because he successfully immigrated to the, and integrated into the Houston suburbs. So, we should talk a little bit here, about Pete Hegseth's wartime experiences in Samara, which is less than about 100, I think it's like 80 miles or something northwest of Baghdad. At age 26, Pete was a lieutenant in the Army National Guard, when he joined the 101st Third Brigade Combat Team. He was deployed in 2005. Prior to this, Hegseth had experienced what you might call an atypical global war on terror career. Again, he graduated from Princeton, he started working at Bear Stearns, and, you know, the

• 59:36Robert Evans?

  same time he'd gotten a position with the Doomed Finance Company, he enlisted in the National Guard. And he was first deployed after 9/11 to Guantanamo Bay, before coming back and working in finance for a while, and then volunteering to fight in Iraq, where he became a platoon leader. He seems to have served, like, functionally did the job reasonably well, there's not, like-

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Shocking.

• 59:55Robert Evans?

  You know, shocking reports or anything on it? He was kept away from liquor, probably.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  I was supposed to say, I was like, what, why did he do that job competently?

• 1:00:03Robert Evans?

  Although he hadn't really kept drinking it, started drinking heavily at this point.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Oh, right, because that was, that was after he got back. Okay.

• 1:00:10Robert Evans?

  And there is a, there's an interesting Washington Post article that quotes one of his fellow officers who was active duty. He was like, I was actually surprised to see a National Guard guy doing the same things Hegseth was doing. And I just assumed that it was because he was planning for a political career and thought a combat tour would help, right?

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Interesting, okay.

• 1:00:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And you run into, if you, if you've known people who were in like, if you know enough military guys, they all have stories of like, yeah, this guy was definitely doing it because he was trying to like, set up a career later down the line and wanted, you know, a combat action badge or something.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  It's like seeing an influencer at a volunteer event.

• 1:00:42Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Sure, interesting.

• 1:00:45Robert Evans?

  Uh, so I'm going to quote from the Post's article here. Charlie Company, numbering about 140 men, was considered the brigade's most aggressive unit, engaging threats with a bravado that would later draw scrutiny from senior leaders, said people familiar with the deployment. As recounted by The New Yorker in 2009, Charlie Company was nicknamed Kill Company and maintained a whiteboard listing confirmed kills, including civilians, that each platoon had notched. The former officer, who served in another company within the battalion, said the behavior exhibited by Hegseth's Infantry Company was viewed as "a little bit strange by those on the outside." We joked sometimes that they were on their own crusade down there. Great stuff.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:20Robert Evans?

  Great stuff.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Good lord, okay.

• 1:01:23Robert Evans?

  Now, what's interesting is when The New Yorker reports on this initially, Hegseth would claim that I actually complained about how aggressive we were to our company commander. And it's specifically that he complained about how they were ordered to have their weapons ready when they were entering targeted buildings because he believed that basically having fingers on the trigger would lead to higher civilian casualties. And that after making these complaints, he was reassigned. I don't know how true this is, right? I don't know if that's something he made up when he thought it would sound better, yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Right. When, when was that interview conducted?

• 1:01:51Robert Evans?

  It was like 2009, that New Yorker article.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  I wonder how, I, I feel like he wouldn't say that today.

• 1:01:56Robert Evans?

  So do I. And he wouldn't claim it at least, right?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Robert Evans?

  But his old unit remained in the field after he got transferred. And as the insurgency hit a new peak of violence, they wound up as part of a raid on an island believed to be a training center for Abu Musabals or Kow. A Q Y or al Qaeda in Iraq. This is like the precursor organization to ISIS. A number of civilians are massacred during this attack. The soldiers who killed them claim initially that they're all military aged males, which is a term for we shot some fucking teenager, but like, look, he's pretty big.

• 1:02:27Robert Evans?

  An army investigation revealed that civilians had been detained and executed while detained and that the killings had been covered up. Two soldiers ultimately pled guilty to murder and related charges and received 18 year sentences. One soldier who testified was sentenced to nine months and another who didn't was convicted of negligent homicide, which was overturned on appeal. Now, there is speculation that Hegseth has since seized upon the issue of US troops being tried for war crimes as a result of this. And for the entirety of his time in the political spotlight, he has since backed prosecuted soldiers, including war criminal Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, claiming the rules of war unfairly tie the hands of men in the field. That Washington Post article, which interviewed a number of his colleagues, ends on this note. The former army officer who served with Hegseth in Iraq said he believes he has latched on

• 1:03:12Robert Evans?

  to populist scenarios in a quest for personal gain. When news of Hegseth's potential nomination emerged, old acquaintances from those days got back in touch with one another, the former officer said. One text he received especially stood out. All it said was WTF?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Robert Evans?

  Great stuff.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:03:30Robert Evans?

  Stuff.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  All right. It's just, it's everything that like leads to horrific war crimes in the modern age are deeply embarrassing, like just

• 1:03:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  really, really lazy texting. And also the fact that in between his, um, his stints in the service that he found time to work at Bear Stearns, he found

• 1:03:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, briefly.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  a little bit of time to

• 1:03:53Robert Evans?

  To work at the doomed bank.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  American economy.

• 1:03:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Like, it's just, it's, you know, what a, what a multi hyphenate, really.

• 1:04:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  I mean, this, I, in, in your view, I mean, this just seems like he's slowly, you know, working behind the scenes to justify civilian deaths so that he can. Ideally escalate to the job he is now, killing civilians with no consequences for anyone.

• 1:04:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yep. So, the next chapter of this book, he compares, it's been several pages, comparing different statements by Ilhan Omar and his buddy Texas Omar, in order to talk about how much Ilhan hates the United States. One of his points is that his friend describes US helicopters as looking like angels, because at one point, he was under fire and he got rescued by a helicopter. And Ilhan describes them as looking like the devil, because she was a civilian in Somalia and saw US helicopters kill civilians.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Oh, no. What a monster.

• 1:04:53Robert Evans?

  No civilians were killed by Americans in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, right? Which he describes as a heroic defensive action by US forces. And the reality is uglier. Well, we don't have perfect accounts for how many civilians died in the fighting. It was between 300 and 700 people who died total, and at least 200 to 300 of those were civilians. Right? And I'll personally note, I have watched an Apache helicopter destroy, like, basically murder an apartment building. And yeah, it looks like the devil. Have you ever seen one of those things empty its entire payload? It's a fucking nightmare. It's very scary. Yes.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Objectively, I mean, it's like, not only is it obviously racist to have this, like, weird chart of two people with the same last name, but like, to just present it with a total void of context. He just like, doesn't even understand how war works, that you'd be terrified of the people about to-

• 1:05:46Robert Evans?

  A thing that's not on your side, that is very deadly, yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're killing people around you. Okay.

• 1:05:52Robert Evans?

  It's one of those things like, yeah, man, if you're, like, I get it, if you're completely surrounded by the enemy, and then a chopper comes in and blows them all away, you'd be like, that thing ripped. That thing's cool. But people have different experiences with helicopters, you know? Like, depending on whether or not they're being shot at by them.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  Not to, not to come down too hard on the other Omar, but like, uh, weird to call a helicopter an angel as it is.

• 1:06:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, and I don't know, again, we don't actually ever get to talk with that Omar.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:21Robert Evans?

  I haven't found any articles interviewing him. He does it like I've Googled around trying to find anyone who talked to this guy. We only have Pete's recollection of him.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  How much do we want to met he, bet he made up a guy?

• 1:06:33Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Uh, he certainly, if he's real, there's no way he's going to talk out and like, correct the record if Pete jidget, cause, cause then he'll get deported, right?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Stay as far away from him as possible.

• 1:06:44Robert Evans?

  So I don't know. I don't, he, and the, the important point is that Pete does not bring in this Omar as a real person with a real story. He brings him in as a foil to his created image of a social justice warrior who never had to fight for anything, right? Uh, such people, he argues, take advantage of 50/50 Americans, uh, who lack grittiness and historical perspective. He describes these people. So you've got the evil leftists and they take advantage of these kind of like milquetoast 50/50 Americans who he calls squishies, right? For their lack of willingness to fight.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Why does he call them squishies?

• 1:07:18Robert Evans?

  Cause they're not willing to fight, cause they're not racist and violent, right? Like they're too squishy. They're too, they're not willing to kill the left, right? They think we can coexist.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  I really don't like that.

• 1:07:27Robert Evans?

  It's his, him talking about like conservatives who are not like outright fascists, right? That, those are the squishies. Um, so it's cool. It's good stuff.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Okay. Sorry. Apologies to, to the squishies. I love you guys.

• 1:07:39Robert Evans?

  Sorry, squishies. Yeah. Great stuff. Um, and it's interesting, you know, the, the thing he's trying to do here, cause he has a whole bit in this about how like, these people don't like to see themselves as political and that's a problem because like, we're in a political war. His whole thing is he's trying, he has to convince these people that like, you need to become political in order to embrace a politics of defensive annihilation against the left, right? And the left is everything but Trump, you know? Like that's what he's trying to convince these, these like moderate Republicans to do. Quote, "For me, awakening has been a progression over many years, informed by multiple iterations of learning and mostly failure. First I had to get informed, then I denied the magnitude." of the leftist problem. Next, being idealistic, naive and new to the political arena, I played

• 1:08:24Robert Evans?

  within the confines of the status quo. Now, as I have some worldly success and a large family, protecting my nest is tempting. I understand what is required of 100% American. The sacrifice, the struggle, the uncertainty, like the uncertainty of stealing from two different veterans organizations to get drunk. Yes. The uncertainty of playing grab ass with all your secretaries. Yes, sacrifice.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, separating your employees by party and not party. They're, look, these are the things ultimately that are going to protect gunner head Seth. Yeah, these are who's.

• 1:08:56Robert Evans?

  Finally, finally, yes. So, okay, um, we end the introduction, the first chapter with a call to arms and follow it.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  The first chapter?

• 1:09:06Robert Evans?

  That's chapter one, baby. And we follow it with two more quotes. Uh, these are both from Donald Trump, and I find them funnier than I should. Quote one, you're a sleaze, candidate Donald Trump to a reporter from ABC News 2016. You're a warrior, Pete, a fucking warrior. President Donald Trump, November 2019. What are the, why are those together? Why is it like, why are you contracting? It's just contrasting him shit talking ABC to him saying nice things to him?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  He's telling a story. It's just so cool. So cool.

• 1:09:34Robert Evans?

  It's like, wow. Okay, Pete, we're all very impressed.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Baddest reporter as warrior is to me a smiley face.

• 1:09:41Robert Evans?

  It's so funny. It's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. It's good stuff. Um, so yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about the next chapter, but I think it's probably time to end part one. Jamie Loftus?

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:55Robert Evans?

  Want to plug anything?

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, my book, Raw Dog, The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, just came out in paperback. And I just released a, uh, I just did an audiobook for the one and only Chuck Tingle.

• 1:10:10Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Um, we're donating all of the, the proceeds to the LA, uh, the LA Street Vendors Fund. Because in LA, they're kidnapping ISIS kidnapping people off the streets. So we're raising money to, you know, help street vendors stay in while maintaining their living. The name of the audio book is This Lesbian Hot Dog Gets Me Off Also She Is A Doctor Also She's Vegan.

• 1:10:37Robert Evans?

  Wow, that's a title. That's so much better than American Crusade.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  And it's a story, is a tale. So if you want to listen to that, donate five bucks to the street vendors fund. If you don't want to listen to that, if you don't want to listen to me read Chuck Tingle Hot Dog's month, you're wrong, but you should donate.

• 1:10:56Robert Evans?

  You are wrong. You're wrong and a bad person. Let's just say it, Jamie. Let's just say it. You're a bad person and God will not recognize you on the day of judgment. He won't know your face.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  To not listen to This Lesbian Hot Dog Gets Me Off Also She's A Doctor Also She's Vegan is not just homophobic, it's anti-women and STEM.

• 1:11:14Robert Evans?

  It's very anti-women and STEM. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is good.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  That's my, those are my plugs.

• 1:11:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, plugs done. Uh, go to hell, everyone. I love you.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Love you too. 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 slash at Behind the Bastards.

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