This May Be the Worst Two Minutes From Hegseth’s Confirmation Hearing

Donald Trump’s defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, refused to answer a series of important questions during his confirmation hearing Tuesday.

“I have read multiple reports of your regularly being drunk at work, including by people who worked with you at Fox News,” Senator Mazie Hirono asked Hegseth. “Do you know that being drunk at work is prohibited for service members under the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice)?”

“Senator, those are multiple false reports peddled by NBC News—”

“I’m not hearing the answer to my question,” Hirono said while Hegseth tried to speak over her.

“You recently promised some of my Republican colleagues that you stopped drinking, and won’t drink if confirmed, correct?” she continued. Hegseth confirmed it to be “absolutely” true.

“Will you resign as secretary of defense if you drink on the job, which is a 24/7 position?” Hirono followed up.

Hegseth started to answer the question indirectly, prompting Hirono to repeat the question. Hegseth again deflected. “I’m not hearing an answer to my question, so I will move on,” Hirono said again calmly.

Hegseth has been accused by former co-workers of being drunk on the job, even reportedly once yelling, “Kill all Muslims” while inebriated at a work event.

Hirono then moved on to questions about using police and the military against protesters.

“In 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with. Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?” asked Hirono, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests that summer.

“I was in the National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events—”

Hirono interrupted, asking her question again: “Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs, as directed to Secretary Esper?” Hegseth continued talking while she talked.

“You know what, that sounds to me that you will comply with such an order; you will shoot protesters in the leg,” Hirono replied. “Moving on!”

Steve Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump and architect of the MAGA movement, has turned his ire against yet another supplicant snake from Silicon Valley: Mark Zuckerberg.

During an episode of his War Room podcast Monday, Bannon took aim at the CEO of Meta, who recently announced a slate of changes to the company’s platforms designed to delight the president-elect. Bannon was less than impressed.

“The corporations are all down there right now with their little million-dollar checks, and they want to come to the, you know, they want to come to the inauguration. They want to wear black tie and pal around and go to all the receptions. That’s all fine. That’s part of an American tradition,” Bannon said. “But those corporations, and particularly the tech corporations, there’s some comments I have in the New York Post today with the great Miranda Devine, talking about Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg can’t be trusted—at all!”

Bannon said he’d gone “absolutely bonkers” when Zuckerberg had been allowed in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, especially considering that the Meta chief had later “put up $450 million of his own money to steal the 2020 election.”

In fact, Zuckerberg and his wife donated at least $400 million to two nonprofit organizations, which doled out grants to state and local governments so they could adapt to Covid-19-era election restrictions in 2020. Zuckerberg later attempted to distance himself from these donations, saying that he intended to “be neutral and not play a role one way or another—or even appear to be playing a role.” This was only after Trump had threatened him with jail time.

“These guys are supplicants now because President Trump is coming in with the American people, have his back. But after six months—a year of hard fighting and resistance at the administrative state and deep level, and the corporations, is Zuckerberg and these guys can be counted on? Only thing they can be counted on is to look after their own self-interest. That’s it,” Bannon said.

While Zuckerberg’s attempts to shift his company rightward and obey in advance by removing some hate-speech restrictions and third-party fact-checking from his sites indicate a serious sycophantism, it seems that Bannon has no time for those who are new to this, not true to this.

That might explain why he recently went after another technocrat clinging to Trump’s coattails, Elon Musk, whom he derided as a “truly evil guy.”

In Devine’s New York Post op-ed published Sunday, Bannon called Zuckerberg “the worst of the worst.”

“He had the biggest platform and went out of his way to try to crush the truth. Remember what he did to the laptop and anything from the pandemic?” Bannon said, referring to Zuckerberg’s decision to “demote” stories about Hunter Biden while waiting for fact-checkers to assess the validity of the story—a decision that the technocrat has since said he regrets. He’s since gotten rid of fact-checking altogether, making it even easier for misinformation and propaganda to spread across his social media platforms.

“He’s been dead wrong on everything,” Bannon continued. “He’s immature and lacks the judgment to have that much power and that much control.”

During Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing to serve as secretary of defense, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called out Hegseth’s comments on women serving in the military.

Hegseth claimed during the hearing, held by the Senate Armed Services Committee, that his problem is not with women—his problem is with military standards that had been changed to accommodate women in different military units. But Gillibrand demanded that Hegseth elaborate.

“Please give me an example, I get you’re making these generalized statements,” Gillibrand said.

“Commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted and that disparages those women who are incredibly capable of meeting that standard,” Hegseth responded.

Gillibrand did not wait for Hegseth to finish before correcting him.

“Commanders do not have to have a quota for commanders in the infantry. That does not exist,” Gillibrand said emphatically. “It does not exist. And your statements are creating the impression that these exist, because they do not. There are not quotas.”

Only two months ago, Hegseth spelled out his views on women serving in the military on the Shawn Ryan Show.

“I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” Hegseth said at the time.

Only a few days later, Hegseth was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as defense secretary, and he has since tried to backtrack on that statement. Presumably, Trump did not have a problem with his views when he announced the nomination, having been a fan of Hegseth’s for many years.

Trump has stood by his choice of Hegseth, even as allegations of sexual and financial misconduct have surfaced. While Democrats are trying to make sure the public doesn’t forget about Hegseth’s troubling past, Trump and Senate Republicans seem to be behind his nomination all the way.

Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, refused to answer whether or not he’d undergo an expanded FBI background check, at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

“I assume you’d be willing to submit to an expanded FBI background check that interviews your colleagues, accountants, ex-wives, former spouses, sexual assault survivors, and others?” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal asked the embattled defense secretary nominee.

“Senator, I’m not in charge of FBI background checks,” Hegseth replied tersely.

“But you would submit to it and support it?”

“I’m not in charge of FBI background checks,” Hegseth repeated before taking a sip of water.

Hegseth has submitted to an FBI background check, but it disturbingly did not include interviews with his ex-wives or any of the women who accused him of sexual assault, according to several people who spoke with NBC News. A more thorough background check could shed more light on allegations that Hegseth has vehemently denied at his hearing—sexual assault, alcoholism, financial fraud, and more. It makes sense that Hegseth pleaded the Fifth.

The MAGA fight to dissolve the Education Department is on.

North Carolina Representative David Rouzer introduced legislation in the House on Monday to eradicate the agency. H.R. 369, titled “To provide for the elimination of the Department of Education, and for other purposes,” was subsequently referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce.

Ridding the country of its national education system will follow through on one of Donald Trump’s boldest and most Project 2025–inspired campaign promises. Other components of Trump’s agenda are quietly dependent on generating extra cashflow that the elimination of the Department of Education could (barely) muster. A major plan is extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit.

Republicans in favor of the extension have mused over several potential cuts to help offset that massive expenditure, including nixing the Department of Education. That would save some $200 billion from the deficit—while simultaneously dismantling the nation’s education system, which already is drowning under the pressure of historically low teacher salaries and scant resources, particularly in low-income regions. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation.

Trump himself has said that his Department of Education plan involves handing the reins and lofty responsibilities of public school administration over to parents, who famously have all the time in the world to oversee educational curricula while simultaneously working jobs and raising their children.

During a rally in Milwaukee in October, the MAGA leader promised that his vision for the nation’s educational system would involve very limited oversight from any government, including the states’.

“I figure we’ll have like one person plus a secretary,” the soon-to-be forty-seventh president said at the time. “You’ll have a secretary to a secretary. We’ll have one person plus a secretary, and all the person has to do is, ‘Are you teaching English? Are you teaching arithmetic? What are you doing? Reading, writing, and arithmetic. And are you not teaching woke?’”

He also openly admitted that the plan would, unfortunately, be to the detriment of a great swath of states—particularly poorer ones in the middle of the country.