March 5, 2026
Pete Hegseth’s Epic Fury
Hegesth press briefing on Iran war. Screengrab from video posted to X.
It wasn’t long into Pete Hegseth’s Monday morning press briefing that I got the feeling he might reach through the screen, grab my throat, and declare war not just on Iran, but me too.
To be fair to our self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” Monday mornings can be a bear. And Hegseth was facing a particularly unenviable one.
Over the weekend, Hegseth’s boss, President Donald Trump, launched a war on Iran via a pre-recorded video filmed from the comfort of his Florida redoubt, Mar-a-Lago. (Trump didn’t let the imminent war interrupt his million-dollar-a-head Saturday night fundraiser.)
Not ready to face a barrage of reporters’ questions about his evolving justifications for war, Trump offered up his defense secretary.
So Monday morning, game face on, Hegseth did his best to explain to a skeptical country why we were — at Israel’s prompting — diving headfirst into another Middle East regime-change war; the very thing Trump railed against on the campaign trail.
Standing before a bank of cameras, Hegseth looked well-coiffed (he didn’t install a makeup studio in the Pentagon for nothing!), but also angry — which is not the disposition you hope for in someone atop the world’s greatest killing machine. Operation Epic Fury was, I thought, an apt descriptor not just for our new war, but Hegseth’s mood.
Heavy on fervor, Hegseth’s briefing lacked basic facts and context.
For 47 years, Hegseth began, Iran’s “death cult” has “waged a savage, one-sided war against America.”
Unmentioned was the US’s 1953 overthrow of the secular and democratically elected Iranian government, which insisted on using Iran’s oil to benefit Iranians, not just western oil companies. After the coup, we proceeded to back a brutal dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, for the next quarter century. When Pahlavi, known as the Shah, finally fell in 1979, it was at the hands of the Islamic movement that remains in power to this day. Our interventions continued into the 21st century; while unable to dislodge Iran’s government, we laid waste to two of its neighbors, Afghanistan and Iraq. And last year, in a prelude to our latest war, we joined Israel in bombing Iran at the tail end of the 12-day war.
Yet, according to Hegseth, it is Iran that has waged a one-sided war on us. They’ve spilled “the blood of our people,” he said.
This rhetoric — which any self-respecting white nationalist would embrace — is not new to Hegseth. In 2015, Hegseth drunkenly chanted “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” the New Yorker reported, citing a complaint from a former employee of Hegseth’s organization at the time.
Hegseth was more restrained Monday morning. But actions speak louder than words, and in the opening hours of our attack on Iran, we (or Israel) bombed a girls’ elementary school, killing over 170 — which Hegseth didn’t bother to mention.
In a follow-up press briefing Wednesday morning, a BBC reporter pressed for details on the school bombing, but Hegseth would only say, “We’re investigating that. We of course never target civilian targets.” (It’s alarming that Hegseth described slain Iranian kids not as “civilians,” but as “civilian targets,” tacking on an ominous descriptor.)
Hegseth was more in his element issuing threats and taunts. He sounds “more like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious secretary of defense,” wrote Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols, who cautioned: “This is not a game, it’s not a TV show, and it’s not some adolescent test of wills.”
The message has yet to sink in.
“Death and destruction from the sky — All. Day. Long,” Hegseth said Wednesday. “This was never meant to be a fair fight. And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
This approach apparently involves targeting not only schools, but also hospitals, Al Jazeera reported. “Attacking a hospital is an attack on life,” wrote Masoud Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon and Iran’s president since 2024. “And attacking a school is an attack on a nation’s future.”
CNN reported that the US-Israeli campaign has also targeted Iranian police stations, while arming militias from the restive Kurdish minority — all in an attempt to overthrow the government, or at least spark civil war and anarchy.
Back at Monday’s press briefing, Hegseth fielded one last question: What is your prayer for US troops in harm’s way? Despite being a softball, Hegseth initially stumbled.
“First of all, my prayer for them is that I do pray for them,” he said. “My wife prays for them, our family prays for them, our Cabinet prays for them. None of this is done on a whim.”
Hegseth’s reply, while garbled, is pretty standard fare for US officials. Less standard is Hegseth’s brand of Christianity. His pastor Doug Wilson preaches, among other things, that women should be prohibited from voting, and Muslims barred from holding public office.
Rather than distance himself from such extremism, Hegseth invited Wilson, “a self-described Christian nationalist,” to lead a prayer session at the Pentagon last month, CNN reported.
Two weeks later, Hegseth worked with Israel to assassinate Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a reportedly cancer-stricken, 86-year-old Muslim cleric with millions of followers around the world.
Now, the Middle East is on fire.
To be clear, Hegseth is just one cog in Trump’s fast-moving wheel. But he’s a worrying cog, especially as Trump appears increasingly desperate to keep his ties to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein out of headlines by waging wars.
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