Pete Hegseth Isn’t Just Waging a Culture War. He’s Rewriting American Manhood.

Why his obsession with “strength” is becoming doctrine, and women are the first casualty.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

We keep covering Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon like it’s a personnel scandal or a partisan provocation—another Trump-era turn of the crank. But in my conversation with journalist Jasper Craven on The Tara Palmeri Show, who covers military and veterans affairs, the more unsettling argument was this: Hegseth isn’t just running the Pentagon. He’s running a masculinity project.

And the Pentagon is the most powerful identity factory in American life.

The anxiety behind the swagger

Craven and I first connected in 2020, when we worked together on the HBOMax documentary Dr. Delirium and the Edgewood Experiments, about the Cold War–era atrocities the U.S. government carried out on its own service members—testing psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs on them in experiments for future wartime use. He now has a new book out, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American, in which he sketches Hegseth as someone who didn’t emerge fully formed as a Fox News–era GI Joe action figure. Hegseth’s backstory is full of nervousness about what counts as being a man, an early shame about a father he saw as insufficiently aggressive, and a lifelong hunger to prove he’s the opposite.

That insecurity has a logic: if you grow up believing masculinity is something you can lose, you spend your adult life building an armor-plated version of it. You overcompensate and perform.

And Hegseth performs through the oldest American shortcut: military masculinity — the idea that aggression is virtue, brutality is strength, and lethality is the only meaningful metric.

Craven’s point is that this isn’t just ideology. It’s psychology with a budget.

What happens when war changes but your masculinity can’t

The 21st-century battlefield doesn’t reward the medieval fantasy. Technology does. Strategy does. A drone operator can rack up a higher body count than a Navy SEAL, an inversion that scrambles the old hierarchy of manhood.

Hegseth’s response, Craven argues, isn’t adaptation. It’s reversion: a desperate attempt to restore an older definition of masculinity — muscle, domination, humiliation rituals, exclusion.

That’s why the fixation on fat generals, shaving beards, and getting back to the ’90s isn’t just cringe. It’s revealing. It’s a man trying to make an institution mirror the story he needs to tell himself.

The woman who broke his self-myth

The most telling detail Craven brought up is Hegseth’s long-running obsession with Leigh Ann Hester, an Iraq War National Guard soldier who became the first woman since WWII to receive the Silver Star for valor in combat.

Hegseth received a Bronze Star but without valor. And two decades later, Craven says, he was still fixating on Hester as proof the awards process was rigged or DEI.

Read that again: a man now running the largest bureaucracy in America is motivated, at least in part, by the psychic injury of being outperformed by a woman.

That’s not politics. That’s grievance in uniform.

How misogyny becomes irreversible

This is where culture war turns into actual structural change.

Craven described Hegseth dismantling or sidelining initiatives that helped women rise in the ranks, and introducing new lethality metrics that function as gatekeeping, even when the claim that standards are different is false.

He also raised the alarm that sexual assault response infrastructure built during the war on terror era is effectively being allowed to die, and that reporting and transparency are being shielded.

That’s the irreversible part: when you change the metrics, gut the programs, and bury the reporting, you don’t just change outcomes for women. You change the institution’s internal incentives — what gets rewarded, what gets punished, what gets covered up, what becomes normal.

And because the military is built on hierarchy and obedience, once that culture hardens at the top, it metastasizes downward.

The leak into civilian life

The Pentagon doesn’t just deploy troops. It exports ideals.

If the nation’s largest bureaucracy starts valorizing a version of masculinity rooted in dominance and resentment and treats the competence of women as a threat then that worldview doesn’t stay on base. It becomes a civilian script that shows up in politics, in schools, in workplaces, in the way men are taught to interpret power: as something you take, not something you earn.

Craven ended with a warning that snaps this into focus: watch the midterms and how the military is positioned in the run-up. Because if a president ever wants to hold power beyond the normal limits, he doesn’t just need propaganda. He needs obedience.

The scariest part of Hegseth’s Pentagon isn’t that it’s anti-woke.

It’s that it’s trying to make one damaged man’s definition of masculinity the country’s operating system.