Pete Hegseth

Based on Wikipedia: Pete Hegseth

On the morning of June 6, 1980, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Peter Brian Hegseth entered the world—born to Brian and Penny (Haugen) Hegseth. It was a quiet beginning for someone who would become one of the most controversial figures in modern American defense policy. Twenty-five years later, in January 2025, Hegseth would stand in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee as the nominee for Secretary of Defense, his fate sealed by Vice President JD Vance's tie-breaking vote—the second time in American history a Cabinet nomination required such a decisive intervention, the first being Betsy DeVos in 2017.

Hegseth grew up in Forest Lake, Minnesota, where he attended Forest Lake Area High School, graduating in 1999 as valedictorian. His father, Brian Hegseth, was a basketball coach for high schools across Minnesota who retired in 2019; his mother, Penny, is an executive business coach who has taught with the Minnesota Excellence in Public Support Series (MEPS), a fellowship and leadership program for Republican and center-right women.

After high school, Hegseth enrolled at Princeton University, majoring in politics. According to Reserve & National Guard Magazine, he chose Princeton over an offer from the United States Military Academy to play for the school's basketball team.

Months before the September 11 attacks, Hegseth joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). During his years at Princeton, Hegseth was publisher and editor-in-chief of The Princeton Tory, the school's conservative student newspaper. In April 2002, as publisher, he declared that he would "defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity." The editors of The Princeton Tory criticized Halle Berry for accepting the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Monster's Ball (2001) "on behalf of an entire race," and The New York Times for announcing that it would print gay marriage announcements, arguing that it would justify publishing marriage announcements for incestuous, zoophilic, and pedophilic relationships. In October, The Princeton Tory published an editorial calling homosexuality immoral.

In response, the president of Princeton's student government, Nina Langsam, wrote a strongly worded email to Hegseth and The Princeton Tory's publisher, Brad Simmons. Her email was published in the following issue.

After graduating from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army through the university's Reserve Officers' Training Corps program. He briefly worked as an equity-markets analyst at Bear Stearns. Hegseth completed his basic training at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, in 2004, and for 11 months he was a Minnesota Army National Guardsman at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

There, he led a platoon of soldiers from the New Jersey Army National Guard guarding detainees. By July 2005, he had returned to Bear Stearns; shortly thereafter, he volunteered in the Iraq War as an infantry officer, where he received a Bronze Star Medal. Hegseth served in the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division, led by Colonel Michael D. Steele.

He began his tour in Baghdad before moving to Samarra, where he served as a civil affairs officer, working with the city council and forming an alliance with council member Asaad Ali Yaseen. Hegseth has described a near-death experience in Iraq in which a rocket-propelled grenade hit his vehicle but failed to detonate.

In 2010, Hegseth deployed with the Minnesota Army National Guard as a counterinsurgency instructor. He volunteered to teach at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan for eight months, during the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan; he taught one of the final classes at the school.

After completing his tour in 2014, he was promoted to major and assigned to the Individual Ready Reserve. Through the reserve, he joined the District of Columbia Army National Guard in June 2019 as a traditional drilling service member, remaining in duty until March 2021. He was barred from serving on duty at the inauguration of Joe Biden after a guardsman flagged Hegseth as an "insider threat," noting a tattoo on his biceps of the words Deus vult.

He left the Individual Ready Reserve in January 2024, writing in his book The War on Warriors (2024) that he resigned over the incident. By August 2006, Hegseth moved to Manhattan and began working at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he met a marine who was working for Vets for Freedom, a political advocacy organization.

He began working for Vets for Freedom in 2006 as an unpaid director; by 2007, he was working full-time as an executive director, and by 2008, he became the organization's president. In May 2007, Hegseth appeared at a presidential campaign fundraiser for John McCain.

In the months leading up to the 2008 United States presidential election, Vets for Freedom began supporting McCain. As the group's chairman, he criticized Democratic nominee Barack Obama for supporting "a dangerous policy of irreversible withdrawal." By January 2009, Vets for Freedom had accrued hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills, leading to an internal campaign to oust Hegseth.

The group merged with Military Families United, and he was removed from leadership by 2011. After returning to Minnesota in February 2012, Hegseth decided to enter the Republican primary for the United States Senate election in Minnesota and had selected a campaign manager, Anne Neu Brindley.

By April, his campaign had raised US$160,000. Hegseth lost to Kurt Bills in the Republican convention in May, and withdrew his nomination days later. He founded MN PAC to support similar candidates, though a third of the organization's funds went to parties for personal friends and family.

Hegseth began working as president of Concerned Veterans of America, a group funded by the Koch brothers, that year. The group criticized President Obama for the 2014 Veterans Health Administration controversy. Hegseth enrolled in the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009 but completed just one semester; he graduated in 2013 with a degree in public policy.

Now let's explore his career after his military service and how he became a prominent figure in conservative media and politics.