The man picked as defence secretary wants to purge the Pentagon

FOUR YEARS ago Pete Hegseth, a telegenic Fox News host and major in the Minnesota national guard, was told that he would be deployed to guard Washington, dc, during the inauguration of Joe Biden. The order was revoked, he recalls, when superiors pointed to his prominent tattoos: a Jerusalem cross on his chest and the words “Deus Vult” on his arm, both symbols of the Crusades but now associated with neo-Nazis. “I joined the army to fight extremists in 2001,” he recalled on an episode of Shawn Ryan’s podcast, published on November 7th. “Twenty years later that same army labelled me one.”