The Full Armour of God.

What the hell are Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump planning to do with the United States Army?

IS IT JUST ME, or was the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, channelling the opening sequence of Patton? Sure, the American flag backdrop was not quite as large as the one in the movie, and Hegseth wasn’t wearing a uniform, but his address to the audience of generals and admirals he’d assembled at short notice from across the globe was no less uncompromising than the monologue delivered (superbly) by George C. Scott in 1970.

The 45-year-old Hegseth would not have been born when the movie was released, but its celebration of Patton’s red-meat approach to war and politics was, at some point, swallowed unchewed by the young man who now bears responsibility for the most powerful military force on the planet.

Hegseth’s hardline speech to the top-brass had but one purpose: to spell out in the clearest terms the Trump Administration’s determination to transform the US military into the ruthless enforcer of the conservative cultural counter-revolution it has unleashed.

That Hegseth is an extreme Christian Nationalist who every day puts on “the full armour of God” makes him the ideal man for the job.

What is a Christian Nationalist? In a nutshell, it’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Patriarchy + the Old Testament + a Jesus who promises to bring “not peace but a sword”. For Hegseth and his fellow CNs, the radical social changes of the 1960s and 70s, now deeply embedded in American society, were unquestionably the work of the Devil and must be rolled back in their entirety.