[Above: Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Iraq war veteran, says Pete Hegseth is “dangerously unqualified” to be defense secretary. - eds.]

I don't think Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump's other controversial appointees will ever go through confirmation hearings. I assume that even if the Senate resists allowing Trump to seat them as recess appointments, simpering toady Mike Johnson in the House will put forth a resolution to recess both houses of Congress, as outlined in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, and get the votes he needs to pass the resolution because most House Republicans will be too afraid of primary challenges and death threats to resist.

But on the off chance that there are Senate hearings on Hegseth's nomination, I hope some Democrat asks him about a passage New York magazine's Sarah Jones found in one of his books:

In American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he outlined his case for Trump’s reelection in 2020 and drew parallels between contemporary America and the medieval era. “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must,” he writes. “Arm yourself — metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

This is probably a naive fantasy, but here's what I want a Democratic senator to ask Hegseth about this passage:

As you know, Mr. Hegseth, I'm a Democrat. Many of the people who voted for me are Democrats.

In the shooting war that you say will be necessary at some point in America's future, who exactly do you think you're going to be pointing guns at? Is it me? Is it my voters? Is it everyone in my state? When this conflict starts -- and the conflict sounds a lot to me like a second civil war -- are we the enemy? I'd like a yes or no answer, please.

This passage was just meant to be pro-wrestling-style trash talk dressed up in fancy language so it sounds like a modern version of an eighteenth-century pamphlet. Fox News and the Republican Party have loved this sort of verbal aggression for a long time. But at a certain point, as Kurt Vonnegut said, we are what we pretend to be. This empty bombast has millions of Americans actually looking forward to a shooting war against Democrats. And we have a president-elect who relishes the notion of using the military against domestic enemies. Secretary of Defense-Designate Hegseth clearly likes the idea, too.

Hegseth would talk around the question, which should lead to a follow-up:

Yes or no, Mr. Hegseth: When you and your allies go to war against fellow Americans, perhaps because the president has invoked the Insurrection Act and deployed the military against citizens, will the mark of the enemy be that we voted for the wrong party? Can you say to me right now, sir, "No, we won't target you just because you vote for Democrats"?

Wouldn't Hegseth offend the president, the president's base, and every binge watcher of Fox News if he said, "No, we won't target you just because you vote for Democrats"? I don't think he'd offer that reassurance.

I'd love for that to be the story of his hearings, assuming they ever happen. I'd love for it to slowly dawn on the mainstream media and normie politics-avoiders that Republicans would be happy to hang half the country for treason just because they vote Democratic. I think there are many centrist voters who don't really get that yet, and who would think it's a bit much. Or maybe that's the naive part of this fantasy.

I also wish someone would school Hegseth on this:

Later, in 2024’s The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth complains that the U.S. military has become too woke, too effeminate, and too vaccinated to be fit for purpose. “At a basic level, do we really want only the woke ‘diverse’ recruits that the Biden administration is curating to be the ones with the guns and the guidons?” he writes in the introduction to The War on Warriors. “But more than that, we want those diverse recruits — pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies — to be sharing a basic training bunk with sane Americans.”

I expect all Republicans in good standing to believe the military is woke -- but "pumped full of vaccines"?

Does Hegseth know about this?

George Washington, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, ordered mandatory inoculation against smallpox for any soldier who had not gained prior immunity against the disease through infection....

As a result of Washington’s orders, the Continental Army was the first in the world with an organized program to prevent smallpox. Some historians have suggested that if smallpox inoculation had been performed earlier, the smallpox outbreak among Continental soldiers in Quebec could have been avoided—speeding up the conclusion of the Revolutionary War....

Does Hegseth know that servicemembers in World War II were "vaccinated for cholera, diphtheria, plague, smallpox, tetanus, typhoid, paratyphoid A and paratyphoid B, epidemic typhus, and yellow fever"? We won that war, dude.

But this is the sociopathy of the right. These people didn't start by opposing vaccines. They saw during 2020 and 2021 that they could use vaccination as a wedge issue, and because all they care about is beating us, they were willing to undermine the health of America (and America's troops) just to own the libs.

And now some of them actually believe what they've been saying. Is Hegseth one of them? Will he change military policy so we no longer vaccinate the troops against diseases like malaria and cholera? Maybe someone should ask him whether precisely which vaccines he no longer wants the troops "pumped full of."

Republished with permission from No More Mister Nice Blog.