Fascism for Fools and Buddy Fuckers
Or the tale of Donny Diapers and his bootlicking servant Krazy Kegsbreath
A convicted felon and an alcoholic are running the United States military.
Let that land.
A man with 34 felony convictions is the commander-in-chief. The man he appointed to run the Pentagon — Pete Hegseth, call him Kegsbreath, he’s earned it — couldn’t get confirmed without seven Republican senators going on record about his drinking, his sexual assault allegations, and his general unfitness to be trusted with anything more consequential than a remote control.
His second wife had a safe word. Not a metaphor — an actual code she could text to friends and family to signal that Pete Hegseth was drunk and volatile and she needed someone to come get her. She used it. She hid in a closet from him. This is in a sworn affidavit, signed under penalty of perjury, submitted to the United States Senate. In 2017, a woman told California police that Hegseth blocked the door of a hotel room with his body, took her phone so she couldn’t call for help, and refused to let her leave. She went to the hospital afterward because she believed she had been sexually assaulted. Hegseth later paid her $50,000 in a settlement. He called it blackmail. The police report exists. The settlement exists. The $50,000 exists.
Seven Republican senators had concerns. They gave him the most powerful military on earth anyway.
These are the men deciding who lives and who dies. Congress is a collection of spineless cowards — cancer cells protecting the tumor, every one of them with the power to end this and not one with the spine to use it.
Start with the school.
February 28, 2026. First day of the US-Israel war on Iran. Classes are in session at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab. Girls between seven and twelve years old. Teachers. Parents who had rushed to pick up their kids after the air raid alerts started.
A US Tomahawk cruise missile came through the roof.
At least 165 people died. Over a hundred of them were children.
The school had been separated from a nearby Iranian military base years earlier — 2013 to 2016, satellite imagery confirmed it. The US target list didn’t know that. Nobody updated the maps. The missile went where it was told.
Here’s why.
Kegsbreath cut the civilian casualty mitigation teams by ninety percent before the first missile launched. These are the people whose entire job is to look at a target list and say: that’s a school now. That’s a hospital. Don’t shoot there. They catch the errors before the errors become dead children.
He cut them by ninety percent.
So on day one of the war, a Tomahawk hit a classroom full of girls because the maps were wrong and the people who check the maps were gone.
Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran probably did it. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions.” A compulsive liar doing what compulsive liars do — blame the bodies.
Kegsbreath stood behind him and said nothing.
The investigation confirmed what the Tomahawk components sitting in the rubble already confirmed. Ours. Our missile. Our target list. Our decision to eliminate the people whose job it was to prevent this.
One hundred and ten children. Sixty-six boys, fifty-four girls, twenty-six teachers, four parents who came to collect their kids and didn’t leave. Think about that. Think about whose kids those were.
A convicted felon — a man with documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein, who started an unnecessary war to keep the country looking elsewhere — blamed the country his missile just struck. An alcoholic promised an investigation.
Now the fishermen.
Somewhere in the Caribbean, before dawn, a fishing boat sits low in the water. Nets out. Men doing what their fathers did, what their grandfathers did.
The missile comes without warning.
One hundred and sixty-three people killed in US boat bombings in the Caribbean. No judge. No jury. No evidence reviewed by anyone with a legal obligation to the truth. The convicted felon said they were drug smugglers. That was enough. Kegsbreath’s military executed the order.
I’ve been in a war zone. Two of them. I know what it smells like when ordnance lands on people. I know what the decision to fire costs — or what it’s supposed to cost, when the people making it have ever been accountable for anything.
Kegsbreath went to Princeton. He made major in the National Guard. In a sane world, a National Guard major would never be handed command of the world’s most powerful military. He has inflated his service record the way a man who changed a tire once calls himself a mechanic. He spent his real career getting paid to have opinions on television, which means he spent his career being accountable for nothing. He has never watched anyone die. He has never carried that weight. He has never had to.
Hegseth should not be in charge of a car wash, let alone the Pentagon.
Four United States Army officers were nominated for promotion.
These are not people who stumbled into anything. These are people who gave decades to an institution that demands everything. Combat records. Commendations. The Secretary of the Army reviewed their files personally and called their records exemplary.
Kegsbreath removed them from the promotion list.
Two are Black. Two are women.
He overrode the Army Secretary’s objection himself, possibly illegally, bypassing the standard process entirely. His chief of staff reportedly explained the reasoning plainly: the President wouldn’t want to stand next to a Black female officer at public events.
Then Kegsbreath called it meritocracy.
Officers who deployed to the same theaters I deployed to. Who served as I did, with more rank and more responsibility. Who earned everything on that promotion list. Erased because of how they would look standing next to a man who avoided military service entirely and whose primary qualification for his current job was hosting a television show where he pretended to fire people.
The word for this is not controversial. It is not a matter of interpretation. It is evil people performing righteousness.
White Christian nationalism is a death cult. The belief that some Americans are more American than others. That some service counts more than others. That some bodies are less acceptable standing next to power. It doesn’t announce itself as racism because it doesn’t have to. It just makes the decisions racism would make and finds other words. Meritocracy. Standards. Tradition.
Same as it ever was. Just louder now.
Here’s what connects the school in Minab to the fishermen in the Caribbean to the four officers who gave everything and got erased.
When you make killing a game — when you spend years in a television studio talking about military force the way you talk about a football play, when you describe bombing campaigns with the casual enthusiasm of someone who has never smelled what a bomb leaves behind — you build a contempt for the people dying on both ends.
The girls in Minab were not real to Kegsbreath. They were a targeting error, which is to say they were a statistic, which is to say they were nothing. The fishermen in the Caribbean are not real to him. The Black female officers who bled for this country are not real to him — they are a diversity initiative to be corrected.
He cut the teams that protect civilians. He erased the officers. He stood behind the convicted felon and said nothing while the convicted felon blamed the country whose children his missile just killed.
And then he promised a thorough investigation.
I still carry my wars with me. I earned what I have the hard way, the same way those four officers earned their promotions, the same way the people on those fishing boats earned the right to go home at the end of the day.
I was a combat correspondent. My job was never to pull the trigger. My job was to make sure people knew what was happening. To document it. To refuse to let it go unrecorded.
Different war. Same job.
A convicted felon and an alcoholic are murdering people. The fishermen in the Caribbean. The girls in a classroom in Minab. They’re spitting on decorated officers who gave decades and got erased for it.
Some days documenting it feels like enough.
Some days it doesn’t.
Pen is a combat correspondent, Marine MOS 4341, and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. Dispatches from a Dying Empire publishes at dyingempire.org.