TO: PETE'S MOM

Dear Mrs. Hegseth,

Please talk to Pete. America doesn’t have a safe word.

He’s at it again — standing in front of the nation’s top generals like it’s open-mic night at Fox & Friends, spitting out slogans and sneers instead of leadership. He rants about “woke shackles” while trying to strap the entire Pentagon into a straightjacket of his own ego. He complains about fat troops, beards, identity months, and climate change as though these are the existential threats facing America, not the authoritarian rot he’s peddling under your family name.

And the irony, Mrs. Hegseth, is almost too rich: your son spends twenty minutes complaining about complaints. He whines that leaders are “walking on eggshells” because soldiers dare to report hazing or bullying — as if accountability is the enemy, not the abuse itself. It’s pure gaslighting. He’s turned the Defense Department into his therapy session, demanding applause while blaming everyone else for noticing the cracks in his mirror.

You warned him once. That email you wrote years ago — the one where you told him he’d abused women, the one where you told him to get help — was truer than you probably wanted it to be. And now the whole country feels like we’re trapped in that same house, listening to his outbursts, watching him puff up his chest, and wondering when he’s going to drive us into the closet too.

But unlike your daughter-in-law, America doesn’t get a closet. We can’t pull the door shut and wait for the shouting to stop. We can’t whisper a safe word and hope someone comes running. We’re stuck out here, face-to-face with your son’s tantrums, and every general in the room today knew it. He humiliated them. He humiliated us. He humiliated himself.

So we’re asking you, Mrs. Hegseth — not because it’s fair, not because it’s right, but because nobody else seems able to get through to him. Please talk to Pete. Tell him that discipline isn’t cruelty, that hazing isn’t toughness, that gaslighting isn’t leadership. Tell him that every time he bellows “F-A-F-O,” the only thing he’s proving is that fascism has found its loudest little mouthpiece.

If you can’t, we’ll have to live with the consequences. And the consequences are ugly. Because when the man in charge of the military thinks “bully harder” is a strategy, what comes next is never strength. It’s collapse.

We are not his pledges. We are not his troops to fat-shame, his pawns to purge, his enemies to threaten. We are the country he swore to serve, not the fraternity he longs to command.

Please, Mrs. Hegseth — for all our sakes — remind him of that.

Sincerely,
Everyone who’s out of patience

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