TATTOO YOU: Hegseth Once Flagged as ‘Insider Threat’ Over Christian Tattoo.

Pete Hegseth, who was picked this week by President-elect Donald Trump to be defense secretary, was once flagged by a fellow service member as an “insider threat” over a tattoo of a Christian motto that has been co-opted by white supremacy groups.

Retired Master Sgt. DeRicko Gaither, who was serving as the D.C. Army National Guard’s physical security manager and on its anti-terrorism force protection team in January 2021, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent on Jan. 14, 2021, warning Army brass of Hegseth’s “Deus Vult” tattoo on his inner arm, calling it “disturbing.”

“Deus vult” is a Latin phrase meaning “God wills it.” It was a rallying cry for Christian crusaders in the 11th century.

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance accused the AP of “anti-Christian bigotry.”

“They’re attacking Pete Hegseth for having a Christian motto tattooed on his arm,” Vance said in a post on X Friday. “This is disgusting anti-Christian bigotry from the AP, and the entire organization should be ashamed of itself.”

Naturally, leftists on social media went all-in, once AP flashed the batsignal:

Wasn’t there a variation of this story in 2018? Yes there was: As Michelle Malkin wrote back then: Weapons of Mass Manipulation — The New Yorker’s fact-checker failed to check her own bias and smeared a military hero.

Impressively, [Talia] Lavin speaks four languages (Russian, Hebrew, Ukrainian, and English). Her abdication of ethical reporting standards, however, raises fundamental questions not only about her competence but also about her integrity — not to mention the New Yorker‘s journalistic judgment.

With a single tweet, the New Yorker‘s professional fact-checker smeared Justin Gaertner, a combat-wounded war veteran and computer forensic analyst for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Lavin, the professional fact-checker, rushed to judgment. She abused her platform. Amid the national media hysteria over President Donald Trump’s border-enforcement policies, Lavin derided a photo of Gaertner shared by ICE, which had spotlighted his work rescuing abused children. Scrutinizing his tattoos, she claimed an image on his left elbow was an Iron Cross — a symbol of valor commonly and erroneously linked to Nazis.

The meme spread like social-media tuberculosis: Look! The jackboots at ICE who hate children and families employ a real-life white supremacist.

Only it wasn’t an Iron Cross. It was a Maltese Cross, the symbol of double amputee Gaertner’s platoon in Afghanistan, Titan 2. He lost both legs during an IED-clearing mission and earned the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with Combat Valor and the Purple Heart before joining ICE to combat online child exploitation.

Lavin has had quite a wild ride since:

She resigned from her position [at the New Yorker] in 2018 after mistakenly comparing a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer’s tattoo to an Iron Cross.^[10] ICE released a statement via Twitter that the officer’s tattoo is a Titan 2 platoon symbol, accompanied by the Spartan Creed.^[11] Lavin had deleted the original tweet before the agency’s statement.^[12] In 2018, she was hired as researcher on far-right extremism by Media Matters for America.^[13] Within “several months”, she was no longer with Media Matters for America, and was hired at New York University where she was scheduled to teach an undergraduate course in the Fall semester called “Reporting on the Far Right”.^[14] The course was canceled by May 30, 2019 when only two people signed up for the course. The Wrap reported her faculty bio had been deleted “around April 20, 2019”.^[15]

Still though, she appears to have landed on her feet. Perhaps anticipating Trump’s win last week, Lavin released Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America in mid-October. It was declared one of “Esquire [magazine’s] Best Nonfiction Books of 2024,” and was published by Hachette Book Group, which after a 2020 struggle session by its uber-woke staffers, refused to publish Woody Allen’s autobiography, despite previously announcing its release. As Roger Kimball wrote at the time:

Hachette, as Oscar Wilde said in another context, can resist anything except temptation. Just so long as a book does not attract the ire of the politically correct establishment, the firm is all for publishing “challenging” books. (Item: Commandant of Auschwitz, a memoir by Rudolf Hoess, is published by Hachette.) But trespass on that PC orthodoxy and watch the capitulation, leavened by moralistic hand-wringing, begin. As Groucho Marx is supposed to have said, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”

As with Trump’s first term, expect leftists to find many more imaginary Nazis to be under the bed in the coming four years.

UPDATE:

MORE: Mark Judge: Vanity Fair, Which Made Me an 80s Brat Packer, Slimes Pete Hegseth.