Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (2014) s13e29 Episode Script
Pete Hegseth
1
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"!
I'm John Oliver. Thank you so much
for joining us. It has been a busy week!
And given the midterm results,
a pretty good week too!
Democrats won so big on Tuesday,
it was sometimes genuinely hard
to take all the positive results in.
In fact, just watch this party
celebrating James Talarico
winning his Senate race in Texas,
before the room suddenly realizes
that Gina Hinojosa
had won as governor there, too.
Yeah, that second piece of news
somehow made that room
bump their screams,
which were already at a level nine,
all the way up to "just won a Mazda
on 'Wheel of Fortune.'"
The results in Texas alone
were incredible.
Democrats won
in every statewide office,
including all four open seats
on the state Supreme Court,
and they flipped
the state house, too.
It was genuinely hard to believe
Texas had just turned blue.
There were videos of people
celebrating in the streets
and chanting
"fuck Greg Abbott" in bars,
but I think my favorite was this piece
of borderline performance art,
set to a Lana Del Rey song,
by a woman dressed in blue,
lying in the arms
of the Buc-ee's beaver.
He holds me in his big arms,
drunk and I am seeing stars,
this is all I think of.
That is perfect. If you are not
celebrating the blue wave
by reclining
like a swooning debutante
in the arms of a litigious gas station
rodent, you are doing it wrong.
Also, kind of nice to hear
a Lana Del Rey song
used as the soundtrack for a celebration
instead of for vaping in the dark.
But it went well beyond Texas,
there were so many incredible wins,
it was hard to even process them.
Because one second, you're realizing
Democrats will have 22 state trifectas.
Next, it hits you that New Hampshire's
newly elected senator
just thanked his husband
in his acceptance speech,
and that Deb Haaland is now America's
first female Native American governor,
while also, by the way,
being the first governor ever
to have dressed as Erling Haaland
for Halloween. That's huge!
And before that can sink in,
you remember Georgia just
elected Keisha Lance Bottoms,
the country's first
Black woman governor,
and Abdul El-Sayed
won in Michigan,
meaning all the hateful shit
thrown his way did not work,
and also that this woman imploded
her own political career for nothing.
Then you realize Susan Collins
lost too,
and decades of having to listen
to her
express "reservations" about something
before going ahead and doing it anyway
are finally fucking over!
Then it hits you, Elon Musk
wasted so much money!
The half a billion dollars he spent
to try and buy the election
just went up in flames faster
than the parked Cybertruck.
Speaking of which,
we also learned this week
he's ending production
of Cybertrucks,
which isn't technically an election
result, but kind of feels like one.
And amazingly, the good news
may not even be over yet,
as it looks increasingly likely
Democrats will pick up a Senate seat
in Alaska, as well as Mississippi.
They are still counting votes there,
but Scott Colom is ahead there,
and when he was told on Wednesday
that his rival, Cindy Hyde Smith,
appeared to have prematurely
declared victory,
he had a quintessentially
Southern response.
Scott, Senator Hyde Smith all
but declared victory last night.
I want
to get your response to that.
Bless her heart.
Bless her heart.
Okay, if you are not from the South,
you should know,
it is basically not possible to say
anything meaner than that down there.
"Bless your heart" was essentially
invented in the South
as a way to commit
legal murder on someone
without getting out
of your church pew.
I should say, Republicans did manage
to win some races on Tuesday.
In fact, you might remember,
we mentioned Anthony Constantino,
the sticker magnate
and pro-Trump rapper,
who'd spent 17 million dollars
of his own money
to run in a deep red district
in upstate New York.
Well, he very narrowly won,
and in response,
he gave an unhinged,
near-30-minute speech,
where he railed at the media
in the back of the room.
And just wait 'til the camera
pulls out at the end,
and you can see
who else was in the crowd.
You're a bunch of fucking assholes.
Look at that asshole right there.
Him. Look at that guy.
Take a picture of him.
You're a bunch of assholes.
Kay Lisa, another fucking asshole.
He's just an angry motherfucker.
Let me explain something to all of you.
How would you feel
if you just had to spend 17 million
because you guys
were a bunch of assholes?
You wouldn't be very happy.
My consultants are a little
stressed out right now.
They're like,
"We never heard this before."
It's okay,
it's a new day in America.
What are you doing, Anthony?!
There's a little child in front of you!
Someone should be
covering her ears,
and also, ideally, her eyes because
nobody, child or adult,
should ever be subjected
to the sight of this outfit,
which screams, "I just got physically
removed from the VMAs."
But the thing is, that wasn't all,
because Constantino's closing message
was a bold policy suggestion
that I promise you won't see coming.
I want to bring excitement
back to New York.
I want to bring jobs
back to New York.
And I got to say this,
I know it's already been asked,
but I think President Trump
should consider freeing Diddy.
This is a historic New Yorker that did
great things for New York state.
I think we should consider it.
That is clearly a wild thing
to suggest, but also,
how is a strategy for "bringing jobs
back to New York" freeing Diddy?
That's like saying, "Time to reverse
the decline in American manufacturing,
so let's let Roman Polanski
back in the country."
First, we are not doing that.
And second,
what do you think that guy does?
Look, there will clearly be more to say
about the midterm results going forward
and, by the way, the fact Trump's
appointed this sentient 4chan post
as his new chief of staff,
really putting to bed the idea
that he might moderate
in the slightest after this drubbing.
But for now, we're actually gonna dive
straight in with our main story tonight,
which concerns Pete Hegseth,
voted "Best Blowjob"
by Breathalyzer Magazine.
As secretary of war,
Hegseth's in charge of America's
largest government agency,
which employs over three million
service members and civilians,
and this year, had a budget
of over a trillion dollars.
He's also the guy you constantly see
trying to show off
by publicly exercising
with troops and recruits,
and to go by fitness experts on the
internet, not doing a great job of it.
Now, what you see here
are two of the most common
mistakes in kettlebell swings.
First is squatting too low
with a deep knee bend.
He's in more of a squat position.
A kettlebell swing
is supposed to be a hip hinge.
Why are you posting that?
Why did you let people see you
swing a kettlebell like that?
I've never seen someone be more
gentle in their kettlebell swing.
It looks like he's trying to do
some kind of ballet move,
which,
he could never fucking do ballet.
He does not have
the strength or stamina.
All this video is showing me is that
he's never sexually pleased a woman.
Like, bro, the kettlebell swing
is a hip thrust motion.
Where the fuck is your thrust?
Yeah, she's right.
And as a certified bell boy,
I couldn't agree more.
It's like I always say to my bros
down at the Kettle Korner,
if your hips ain't thrustin',
your glutes are rustin'.
For more tips like that,
just check out my workout video,
"Put the Kettle On:
Gettin' Jacked with Johnny O."
But when Hegseth's not actively
embarrassing himself with a kettlebell,
he's been lecturing the military on
all the changes he wants to make.
Here he is at this year's
State of the Force address,
where he made an audience
of about 600 rank-and-file troops
listen to some fun wordplay
with the occasional slur.
No more silly PowerPoint trainings
or drag queen shows.
No more diversity quotas,
no more gender pronouns,
no more identity months.
We are no longer the woke
department or the weak department.
Simple translation of that,
no fanny, no fatties,
no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos,
no wimps, no radicals.
Just warriors.
Okay, first, if you're gonna go
on stage and spew hate,
at least don't flub the delivery
like a middle schooler
about to lose his first rap battle.
But also, that is just pathetic.
It sounds less like
an inspiring piece of oratory,
and more like he's reading from a book
"Dr. Seuss for Concussed Bigots".
But unfortunately for Hegseth,
a man obsessed with optics,
from day one in his job,
things haven't looked great.
Early on,
there was the Signalgate fiasco,
where a journalist was inadvertently
added to a Signal group chat
about upcoming military strikes.
And more recently,
there's been the war in Iran,
which has been an utter fiasco
that's achieved none of this
administration's original goals.
Not only has there been
no regime change,
the Strait of Hormuz
is now under Iranian control,
and there seems to be
no easy way out of this conflict.
All of that
is pretty hard to spin away,
although, not for a lack
of Hegseth trying.
Some close to the president
have apparently expressed frustration
that he's not been honest about
the state of the war,
with one person saying,
"Hegseth is good at telling
the president what he wants to hear."
And while the Pentagon insists
that is "dead wrong",
it's not like we haven't seen him
try and sugarcoat things before.
In fact, just watch him
during the early days of the war,
literally trying to dictate more
flattering headlines to reporters.
Allow me
to make a few suggestions.
People look up at the TV and
they see banners, they see headlines.
"Mideast War Intensifies"
splashing on the screen
the last couple of days,
alongside visuals of civilians,
or energy targets that Iran has hit,
because that's what they do.
What should the banner
read instead?
How about,
"Iran Increasingly Desperate".
Another example of a fake headline
that I saw yesterday, "War Widening".
Here's a real headline for you
for an actual patriotic press.
How about, "Iran Shrinking,
Going Underground."
Look, that is clearly absurd.
Although it does kind of make me want
to read his preferred headlines about
other notorious historic disasters.
"Giant Zeppelin Provides
Much-Needed Warmth on Windy Day."
"Brave Tanks Stand
Tall in Front of Deadly Man."
"Luxury Cruise Passengers Receive
Refreshing Cold Plunge Experience."
Now, that was back in March,
and since then,
many seem to have run out
of patience with Hegseth.
In fact, in September, Republican
Representative Thomas Massie
moved to impeach him,
but Speaker Mike Johnson conveniently
sent lawmakers home early,
ensuring that an impeachment
resolution wouldn't be taken up
until after the midterm elections.
But guess what?
Tick tock, bitch,
the midterms are over.
So given that, tonight,
let's talk about Pete Hegseth,
the clear warning signs
he'd be a disaster in this job,
the damage he's already
done to the military,
and the irreparable harm he's
done to human beings overseas.
And let's start by acknowledging that,
to be fair to Pete Hegseth,
he has always sucked.
When he was an undergrad
at Princeton,
he was the publisher
of a conservative student paper
which ran, among other things,
a piece that he wrote
attacking the school's "gratuitous
glorification of diversity."
After college, he joined the Army
Reserve and National Guard,
but, tellingly,
never rose particularly far.
He didn't rise to a command position
where he would learn management,
joint forces operations,
or logistics,
and he never commanded
a task force or a detachment.
After leaving active duty,
he headed two different
veterans' advocacy organizations,
where he reportedly faced serious
allegations of financial mismanagement,
sexual impropriety
and personal misconduct,
including being
repeatedly intoxicated at work.
And while he has denied those claims,
some of them are truly dire,
with one former employee
describing Hegseth
being at a bar during a work trip and
drunkenly chanting "kill all Muslims",
while another report described a night
in which he had to be restrained
while drunk from joining the dancers
on the stage of a Louisiana strip club.
And if you are too drunk
to be in a Louisiana strip club,
a state where they have
drive-through daiquiri shops,
you have got a problem.
Eventually,
Hegseth landed at Fox News,
where he spent years
on their weekend morning show
doing dumb stunts like bull riding,
sumo wrestling,
and hitting himself in the crotch
with a skateboard.
He also, infamously, missed the target
during an axe-throwing demonstration.
And if you are thinking,
"Jesus, that axe could've hit
someone!" Guess what?
What you didn't see on-air is what
the axe hit, or should we say, who?
West Point marching band
member Jeff Prosperie
got hammered by the axe while the
other band members kept drumming.
Holy shit! If I can speak
to those other band members,
you do know you can stop drumming
if someone gets
an axe thrown at them, right?
Just pause for an eight count
and see if Jeff's all right!
It wasn't all "Jackass" lite. If you
look back at Hegseth's time on TV,
you can find plenty of troubling
evidence of his worldview.
He made frequent appeals
through his Fox News platform
for Trump to intervene
on behalf of service members
in three cases
involving war crime accusations.
And those efforts, both publicly,
and privately with Trump,
were ultimately successful.
And speaking of war crimes,
by the way, back in 2020,
when Trump was threatening
to destroy Iranian cultural sites,
Hegseth defended him on-air,
in some pretty breathtaking terms.
I don't care about Iranian cultural
sites, and I'll tell you why.
If they could, if Iran could,
if you understand
the Islamic Republic of Iran,
of Islamists, if they could,
if they had the power,
they would destroy every single one
of our cultural sites
and build a mosque on top of it.
That is not a great thing to hear
from the person currently overseeing
a war with Iran, is it?
Also, for what it's worth,
I highly doubt that Hegseth and I
could even agree on what America's
most important cultural sites are.
He's probably thinking about
a bunch of Confederate statues
and the first place his great-great
grandfather ever fucked a gun.
Whereas I'd be concerned with real
sites of U.S. cultural history
like the restaurant where Theresa
flipped the table and screamed,
"Prostitution whore!"
or Boston's majestic cop slide.
Oh, fuck!
It's still so good! That slide's
cultural impact is so huge,
it's even listed on Google Maps now,
so people from around the world
can go pay their respects to it.
But maybe the clearest articulation
of Hegseth's views on the military
came in a book that
he published in 2024
called "The War on Warriors",
about all the ways that "wokeness"
was apparently destroying it.
In the book, he likened DEI
to a "cultural Marxist revolution
ripping through the Pentagon"
and claimed it was impacting recruiting
to the point where, and I quote,
"America's white sons and daughters
are walking away" from the military.
A central incident in it
involves the fact
that when National Guard members
were called in
to help protect Biden's inauguration,
Hegseth was prevented from serving.
Now, he insists that that was because
he had an innocuous Christian tattoo.
In fact, here he is on a podcast
showing it off
and describing
what he claims he was told.
Right here. This one is…
what got me disinvited.
Someone inside the D.C. Guard
trolled your social media,
found a tattoo, used it as an excuse
to call you a white nationalist,
an extremist, and you were
specifically by name orders revoked
to guard the inauguration
because you are considered
"a potential threat".
How is that… it's a cross.
It's a Christian symbol.
That's all it is.
What an interesting story Pete
is telling there to a man
that, for some reason, sounds
like Marlon Brando in "The Godfather".
Just one thing, though, it wasn't
actually that tattoo that was the issue.
It was this one, reading,
"deus vult" or, "God wills it",
a Christian battle cry
from the first crusade
that's become popular among
white supremacist groups.
In fact, the sergeant who raised
those concerns about Hegseth
even clarified,
"Just so we are clear,
this has nothing to do with
the Jerusalem cross tattoo on his chest.
This has everything to do with the
'deus vult' tattoo on his inner bicep."
And while Hegseth denies that tattoo
has any connection to extremists,
it is telling that he goes out
of his way to pretend
that the issue was
with a different one.
And it's pretty hard to believe that
he got "deus vult" inked onto him
without having any idea
of its broader context.
It's not like when Ariana Grande
got this tattoo on her palm
that was supposed to say
"seven rings" in a Japanese script,
but which actually spells
"BBQ grill."
No. I think Hegseth probably
knew what he was doing.
And that's not the only
red flag in his past,
as Hegseth also has ties
to Christian nationalists.
He's a member of the Communion of
Reformed Evangelical Churches
and has praised its co-founder,
Doug Wilson, a far-right pastor
and self-described Christian nationalist
who, among other things,
wants to repeal
a woman's right to vote,
has called the immigration of Muslims
and Hindus to the U.S. "parasitic",
and believes homosexuality
should be a crime.
And while I could go on,
it might be easiest just to show you
the first 20 seconds
of one of Wilson's videos
because it pretty
neatly sums up his whole vibe,
before hard-cutting
to a very cool graphic.
Godly women
want to feed their men.
Godly women are designed
to make the sandwiches.
This is not an absolute law
like going about making babies.
And there are times when a man
fends for himself
and makes
quite a decent sandwich.
But in the general scheme of things,
the apostle Paul wants the women
to make the sandwiches.
I mean, that's clearly
a whole lot of nonsense,
from the completely ahistorical
understanding
of when sandwiches were invented,
to the phrase
"the natural use of the woman".
And even engaging with that level
of misogyny feels like a waste of time,
so instead let me respond like this:
Doug Wilson looks
like Santa on methadone.
He looks like someone
tried to pickle Jeff Bridges.
Are those his normal clothes,
or was that day's theme
"dress like a pedophile
reintroducing himself into society"?
And I've got some really bad news
for you, Old Saint Dickolaus,
a woman wrote all that.
In fact, she did such a good job,
I made her a sandwich.
And given Wilson is one of Hegseth's
spiritual thought leaders,
it probably won't surprise you
that this is how
he's talked about women in combat.
Women shouldn't be in combat at all.
Not at all.
They're life givers, not life takers.
I know a lot of wonderful soldiers,
female soldiers who have served,
who were great,
but they shouldn't be in
my infantry battalion. Not once.
Fuck you!
It is absolutely ridiculous to assert
that because women can give birth,
it makes them incapable
of practicing violence,
especially since I'm pretty sure
that if you said that
to any woman
who had just given birth,
she could and would rage ram
your head through a fucking wall.
And I'm gonna point out,
everything I've shown you
since Hegseth's college years
has been stuff he said and did
before the Senate voted
to confirm him as defense secretary.
As, by the way, is the fact
he'd paid 50,000 dollars to a woman
who accused him
of sexual assault in 2017,
an accusation he denies,
and the fact his own mother once
wrote him this pretty striking letter.
In a 2018 email to her son
obtained by the New York Times,
Penelope Hegseth wrote,
"On behalf of all the women,
and I know it's many,
you have abused in some way,
I say get some help
and take an honest look at yourself."
That's from his mom!
Most moms send emails like,
"Don't forget your sister's
birthday tomorrow,"
or "Here's the name of that
book I was telling you about"
or "Your dad can't get the Apple TV
to work, call us now!"
Not basically, "Fix yourself,
you sex pest. XOXO, Mom."
She apparently sent that email
when Hegseth and his second wife
were in the middle
of an ugly divorce.
And while she later claimed she'd
retracted it with an apology email,
its contents are truly damning,
given that she also wrote,
"You are an abuser of women.
That is the ugly truth
and I have no respect for any man
that belittles, lies, cheats,
sleeps around, and uses women
for his own power and ego."
"You are that man,
and have been for years,"
and "as your mother, it pains me
and embarrasses me to say that,
but it is the sad, sad, truth."
Which is pretty brutal.
Honestly, I don't know what
you're talking about, Pete,
with this whole
"women can't be life takers" shit,
because it seems your own mom
just took you the fuck out.
So, that is the guy Trump picked
to be secretary of defense,
despite, by the way,
nobody recommending him.
Apparently, Trump was presented
with a shortlist of names
of potential defense secretaries,
and asked, "Where's Pete?"
And when his advisors apparently
looked around confused,
Trump said,
"Pete Hegseth. I want Pete."
In fact,
he was such a left-field choice,
one defense lobbyist literally reacted
with, "Who the fuck is this guy?"
But unfortunately, the answer
to that question is now,
he's the guy who just spent
the last two years
taking a wrecking ball
to the U.S. military.
And to understand the depth
of the damage he's wrought,
it is worth starting with the thing
he seems utterly obsessed with:
the racial and gender makeup
of the military.
Because he's made
some sweeping changes,
like instituting a complete ban
on transgender military service.
That is something
that was understandably devastating
to the many trans service members,
like this one,
who'd dedicated their lives
to the military.
I served for 16 years. I missed
births, I missed several deaths.
I have some tattoos
that are memorial pieces,
because I was on deployment
and couldn't get away.
I dedicated everything,
all of my brain power,
my heart and soul,
to this organization
to now see that
they don't want me.
It makes me feel
not just replaceable,
but, like, lower than low, like trash.
Yeah, that's maddening.
And for the record,
the only person in this situation who
actually should be feeling like trash,
is this walking Jell-O shot with
a personality that, quite literally,
not even a mother could love.
But that trans service ban
was just the tip of the iceberg.
Because in keeping with his desire
for a "war on DEI",
Hegseth quickly made some
very high-level changes.
Take General CQ Brown,
a highly decorated command pilot
who made history as the first-ever
Black chief of a U.S. military branch.
He was nominated by Trump
during his first term,
and confirmed unanimously
by the Senate.
Brown eventually rose
to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
And that apparently infuriated Hegseth,
who wrote in his shitty book,
"Was it because of his skin color?
Or his skill?
We'll never know,
but always doubt."
Almost immediately upon taking
office, Hegseth removed Brown,
and did the same
with Admiral Lisa Franchetti,
the first woman
to lead the U.S. Navy.
And that was just the beginning
in what's been called a purge
of senior military officers
"on a scale unlike anything in
the modern history of the department."
Since taking office, Hegseth has fired
or blocked the promotions
of about 10%
of the military's top officers,
including at least 45 officers,
selected by boards made up
of peers, from promotion lists,
which is an incredibly rare thing
for a defense secretary to do.
And tellingly, more than half of those
officers have been female or Black.
So, for someone clearly obsessed
with rejecting woke identity politics,
he seems more than happy to inject
his own ideological leanings
deep into the department.
In fact, he even had Doug Wilson,
you know,
Mr. "God said make me a sandwich",
give a sermon
at the Pentagon in February,
and hired this guy, Ryan Higgins,
as a "senior faith adviser",
despite the fact
he has a history of offensive posts,
like this one from 2021.
They need to know
that abortion is murder.
They need to know that marriage
is between a man and a woman
and anything else is abominable.
They need to know that transgender
isn't something you choose,
but it's actually a mental disorder.
I would not trust that man
to be an advisor on anything,
not faith and certainly not facial hair,
because what the fuck is that?
It looks like he asked a middle schooler
to draw a penis on his chin.
He looks like Howie Mandel
as an undercover cop.
And the thing is, Higgins has continued
that rhetoric in the Pentagon,
posting things like referring
to the "satanic cult of LGBTQ"
and calling abortion
"demonic human sacrifice".
Yet not only has the Pentagon
kept him in his advisory role,
they've said he's a valued member
of the secretary's team
and does an outstanding job.
And even when Hegseth's personnel
decisions haven't been actively bigoted,
they've been unbelievably stupid,
with perhaps the dumbest
involving Kid Rock.
Very basically, back in March,
two Army helicopters deviated
from their training route
to do a fly-by at Kid Rock's house
in Nashville,
and he then posted a video of it.
That flight was unauthorized
and involved one
of the helicopters getting pretty low,
which is why then-Army chief
of staff General Randy George
supported a follow-up investigation
to see if any safety regulations
had been violated.
Although, when Kid Rock later
relayed that story to a local reporter,
he seemed pretty confident that
no one was gonna get in trouble.
Man, I was sitting right there,
just having, like, kind
of Saturday morning beer,
and I seen a chopper start coming.
I was like, man, it looks like military.
Then they circled back around
and came out right over here.
And so, I just, you know,
gave them a salute
and, you know,
kind of a thank you.
The military is, like,
looking into this to see
if they did this
for their own pleasure, I guess.
What do you have to say to that?
I think they're going to be all right.
My buddy's the commander-in-chief.
Listen, there is so much for us
to unpack there,
from the sudden zoom
into his mustache,
to the concept
of a Saturday morning beer.
But I want to take just a moment
on Kid Rock's house.
It turns out, it's not just a sick pad
with a Statue of Liberty by the pool.
He's actually branded it
the "Southern White House"
because he designed it
to look like this. Gorgeous.
It features framed, signed letters
from Donald Trump,
a golden U.S. Constitution,
a golden urinal,
a seven-foot-tall wood-carved
middle finger,
a convenience store-style
queso dispenser,
Rolling Stones and NASCAR-branded
pinball machines,
the sledgehammer that was used
to break down Osama Bin Laden's door
during the 2011 raid
on his compound,
and an indoor grotto
that he says
was built with Playboy Mansion-style
shenanigans in mind,
but now is mostly used when
his grandchildren come by
and want to go swimming indoors.
Basically, think of it
like Dollywood for dads
who only get you once a month.
But he was actually right about
the pilots not getting in trouble,
the investigation did get squashed,
mainly thanks to Pete Hegseth,
who terminated it himself
and exonerated the aircrews involved,
even proudly tweeting,
"Thank you, Kid Rock.
U.S. Army pilots suspension lifted.
No punishment. No investigation.
Carry on, patriots.
American flag emoji."
But here is a retired
Air Force brigadier general
explaining the problem with that.
So, I hate to be the fun-sucker, but
flight discipline is flight discipline,
and no violation
of flight discipline is okay.
You basically just said,
"Hey, pilot force,
if you want to fly by your mom's
house, that's cool with us."
And I watched people lose their
entire careers over that kind of crap.
And so, yeah, I get it,
it's Kid Rock, it's not good enough,
and I'm sorry, we need to be
a professional, disciplined force.
And when Hegseth says,
"Hey, don't worry about it,
no investigation, no punishment,"
I understand the spirit, but he doesn't
know what you know and what I know,
and that these things are big
and complex and dangerous…
And don't micromanage.
That's not your job.
You've got a lieutenant colonel down
there who can handle that perfectly.
Yeah, exactly. And that conversation
is taking place on Newsmax.
That's the network for people who think
Fox News is full of communists.
It is genuinely strange to see
a reasoned and measured take
from that network.
It's like seeing a donkey
correctly put on a condom.
Look, I'm glad
that you're being responsible,
I just didn't know
that you were capable of that.
Now, notably,
two days after Hegseth tweeted about
the investigation being dropped,
General George was fired, without
explanation, in a 15-second phone call.
While the Pentagon maintains that
had nothing to do with this incident,
the timing is pretty hard to miss.
Hegseth has now been responsible
for so many high-ranking officer
being fired, pushed out,
or walking,
it is honestly hard
to keep track of them all,
from General Christopher Donahue,
a decorated military leader,
who's been described
as a generational talent,
to three-star Lieutenant General
Brett Sylvia,
a highly regarded officer
and combat veteran.
Sylvia was accused of leaking
to the media
and forced to undergo
multiple polygraph exams.
But despite the fact the Pentagon
has not offered
any details or proof in support of
the leaking allegations, he was fired.
And that was pretty obviously
Hegseth's doing,
especially given that when Trump
was asked about Sylvia's firing,
he clearly had no idea
who he even was.
What proof do you have
Lieutenant General Sylvia leaked
classified information at the Pentagon?
On what?
Lieutenant General Sylvia leaked
classified information at the Pentagon!
She's got problems. She's gonna
have big problems. She did.
We're very much looking
for leakers.
And she's gonna have big problems.
Long-term problems.
Yeah, he just assumed
General Sylvia was a woman there.
Because of course he did.
How is Trump supposed to know
that generals don't tend to go
by their first names?
We all know
he never served in the military,
as during Vietnam, he came down
with a nasty case of the "don't wannas".
And the thing is, the vacuums left
by these high-level personnel changes
are going to be long-lasting.
Because it takes 25 years
to become an admiral or a general,
and that's just to get
your first star.
Four-star generals can take
an additional decade or more.
As one lawmaker has said,
Hegseth's purging a generation
of great leaders,
and it's going to take
a generation to recover from it.
So, that's how he's changed
the makeup of the military,
which would be bad enough.
But he's also trying to change
how it conducts itself,
by removing
some very important guardrails.
For one thing, at an address
to generals and admirals last year,
he basically said that when it comes
to combat, anything was gonna go.
We also don't fight
with stupid rules of engagement.
We untie the hands of our warfighters
to intimidate, demoralize,
hunt and kill
the enemies of our country.
No more politically correct and
overbearing rules of engagement,
just common sense,
maximum lethality
and authority for warfighters.
You kill people and break things
for a living.
You are not politically correct
and don't necessarily belong
always in polite society.
Truly, what the fuck
is he talking about there?
"You break things for a living
and don't necessarily belong
in polite society."
That is not a message for the military,
but for the fucking Minions!
In Hegseth's own words,
he apparently wants "maximum
lethality, not tepid legality."
And the Pentagon even tweeted,
"Low cortisol.
Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing."
Which I'm worried
might actually be too cool.
He's also taken multiple steps
to reduce any accountability
for those who might have
"overmaxxed their lethality."
For one thing, he's targeted
judge advocate generals, or JAGs.
Those are lawyers whose job it is
to make sure actions
taken by the military are legal,
and to prosecute service members
who break the law.
In fact, not long after taking office,
Hegseth fired the top JAGs
for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
But that's not all.
'Cause he also gutted a program called
Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response,
which among other things
worked to give military personnel
a more detailed picture of life
and locations in combat areas
in an attempt
to reduce civilian harm.
Which is something that you would
think you would want.
Yet Hegseth, over the objections
of his commanders, by the way,
stripped the program
of almost all its funding,
leaving only a handful of people
to carry out its mission.
And he did that because he apparently
felt focusing on civilian security
was "woke" and out of step
with "maximum lethality".
And unfortunately,
all of that brings us
to what Hegseth has used the military
to do over the last two years.
Because the first major operation
of his tenure
was the air campaign in Yemen
last spring that killed 153 civilians
and wounded 243 others,
an operation that he nonetheless
celebrated
as a "clear, limited mission executed
with ruthlessness, full stop."
And sadly, that dismissive approach
set the tone
for everything that has followed,
like Operation Southern Spear,
a series of strikes
starting last September
on boats allegedly carrying drugs
in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
And though there is still a lot
we don't know about those strikes,
the information that we do
have does not look good.
Military officials showed a group
of lawmakers video of multiple strikes
on a suspected drug boat
off Venezuela in September.
Two survivors
of the initial attack were killed.
You have two individuals
in clear distress
without any means of locomotion,
with a destroyed vessel
who are killed
by the United States.
The DOD's Law of War manual
states
that "shipwrecked combatants
are in a helpless state,
it would be dishonorable and inhumane
to make them the object of an attack."
Yeah, and that makes sense.
Generally, if someone is shipwrecked,
they're not a threat, are they?
It's one of the many reasons
why "Titanic" didn't end
with Jack and Rose getting blown
to shit by the U.S. Navy.
And while Hegseth maintains
those strikes were legal,
we haven't seen
the official justifications for them.
And experts are not so sure.
In fact, former military lawyers
have argued that if the U.S. were
at war with the traffickers,
as this administration's
tried to argue,
then killing the boat's occupants
would in essence be a war crime.
But if we're not at war with them,
then killing any of the men
in the boats "amounts to murder".
So, basically, your options are murder,
war crimes, or, by the way, both.
And again, even Newsmax
got squeamish about this.
Because here's former Fox analyst
Andrew Napolitano weighing in.
And it gives me no pleasure
to say what I'm about to say,
because I worked with Pete Hegseth
for seven or eight years at Fox News.
This is an act of a war crime,
ordering survivors
who the law requires be rescued
instead to be murdered.
There's absolutely no legal basis
for it.
Everybody along the line who did it,
from the secretary of defense,
to the admiral, to the people
who actually pulled the trigger
should be prosecuted for a war crime
for killing these two people.
Exactly.
That elderly werewolf is right.
If a coworker
of seven years does a war crime,
you kind of have no choice but
to publicly say so on the news.
I've worked with Mr. Nutterbutter
for over seven years now,
but if he ever found himself on trial
in Hague for using chemical weapons,
I'd have to denounce him.
I wouldn't like it, but it would be
the right thing for me to do.
But obviously, the major conflict
right now is the war in Iran.
And from the start,
it has been clear
that minimizing civilian casualties
just was not a priority.
Because on the very first day
of the war,
a strike hit an elementary school
in Minab,
killing more than 150 people,
including at least 123 children.
In the wake of that missile strike,
people tried to figure out
how that sort
of a mistake could happen,
and the answers that we've gotten
so far are just enraging.
Because while the site had once been
identified as a military base,
in the years since,
things had clearly changed,
and it was operating openly
as a school.
The signs of that
were visible for nearly a decade,
and they were pretty hard to miss,
given aerial images clearly show
a soccer pitch, line-up zones,
play area markings
and brightly painted walls.
In fact, the school even had
its own website
and was labeled on Google Maps.
And when you can use
the same technology
to find out that that's a school,
that you can use to locate
the fucking cop slide in Boston,
it feels like that's probably
something you should've done.
And look, I cannot say
that if Hegseth hadn't gutted
the Civilian Harm Mitigation program,
that it would've definitely
prevented that strike.
But this tragedy sure feels
like the symptom of a military
that seems to care a lot more
about "lethalitymaxxing"
than actual human beings.
And while I know this is rough,
it is worth hearing
what that strike did on the ground.
The school had gone.
There was only the smell
of smoke and children's hair.
I saw a hand, a foot.
They had been torn to pieces.
I called out to Setayesh,
"Where are you?
You were fasting…
You'll suffocate in this smoke."
Like many of the parents here,
her grief has become
intertwined with anger.
May Trump be destroyed.
May he drown
in the blood of these children.
May he be struck down
with suffering.
Yeah, that is utterly heartbreaking
and it was completely avoidable.
And being furious at the people
that did it makes complete sense.
But I also want you to hear
from this 11-year-old girl
who was in the school that day,
because the distinction that
she draws at the end of this clip
is just beyond generous.
When they hit the school, the entire
building shook from side to side.
The windows shattered.
Everything was shaking.
Hours later, Reyhaneh learned
that she had lost her little sister,
a first grader at the school.
Rayhaneh says she has hate in her
heart for what happened to her sister,
but not for the American people.
It's just the government
that's cruel and dirty.
Most people in America are good.
They know this is not right.
It is truly damning that an 11-year-old
is somehow displaying
more integrity and moral clarity
than Pete Hegseth has ever shown
in his entire fucking life.
And while I would love to say
that we are worthy of that level
of trust from her,
at this point,
I'm honestly not so sure.
Especially because all this
was completely foreseeable,
and yet Hegseth
was confirmed anyway,
which should be a lasting stain
on every single person who did it.
There is clearly damage here
that cannot be undone,
but the very least we can do
is try and stem it
by impeaching and removing this
fucking asshole as soon as possible
and ideally,
in a way that also ensures
he'll be barred from ever
holding future federal office.
Because it's not like
he is ever going to change.
In fact,
in the wake of Tuesday's election,
amid speculation he might be
about to be impeached,
Hegseth released a defiant video in
which he condemned the impeachment
and called the Iran war a "courageous
and historic" effort,
all while desperately
sucking up to his boss.
President Trump's War Department
has never been afraid to lead the way.
Just like the president,
we don't back down,
and that especially applies now.
You see, they attack me, they attack
us, because we are effective.
It's not gonna work.
We will not back down.
As always,
President Trump leads the way.
In service of our nation,
he has endured more
than anyone can fathom.
He literally took a bullet
for this nation.
He shook his fist and said,
"Fight, fight, fight." And so will we.
Okay, first, "took a bullet"
is a pretty strong term
for "got grazed
and needed an ear Band-Aid."
But that is also just embarrassing.
Nothing about that projects strength.
If anything, it has the energy
of Lefou sucking up to Gaston,
if Gaston got winded
climbing a small flight of stairs.
That is so far beneath the dignity
that Hegseth's office requires,
although depressingly, it's also pretty
much par for the course with him,
given our dealings
with the Pentagon this week
have at times felt like dealing
with a bunch of dickhead teenagers.
When we asked about Hegseth's
college condemnation of diversity,
their official response was,
"The secretary was and remains
absolutely correct on this topic.
He is very based."
And when we asked
if there was any other info
they felt was important for us
to know,
after all that we've talked
about tonight, they responded,
"Deport John Oliver.
Pentagon spokesman."
I know that when, hopefully,
Hegseth eventually gets impeached,
and kicked out of his job,
he'll probably just crawl
right back to Fox News
so he can host some shitty show called
"Battle Lines with Pete Hegseth",
where he'll do stunty bullshit
like playing beer pong with Kid Rock,
or dressing up as a bear and
trying to catch a salmon in his mouth,
or maybe finishing what he started
all those years ago
and finally axe-murdering
a marching band drummer.
But that will still be vastly preferable
to where he is now.
So, hopefully,
Congress will fix
what it never should've allowed
to happen in the first place
and remove him from office.
Because while I know Hegseth
desperately wants
the headline for his tenure
in the job to be
"Big Strong Manly Man Restores
Military, parentheses, White",
if I, like him, may suggest
a much more accurate headline,
I'd go with "Kettlebell Dipshit Ruins
Everything, parentheses, Mom Agrees."
And now, this.
The Continuing Saga of Newscasters
Versus the Term "Leaf Peeping".
They'll go to the Northeast,
they'll go to the UP,
they plan their trips
around peak fall foliage.
I get that, but they call it,
"I'm going leaf peeping."
They're going leaf peeping,
all of them, every single one.
Okay. It does sound kind of…
It's a clever way to phrase it.
I don't like
the saying "leaf peeping".
Do you like that saying,
"leaf peeping," Jen?
Yeah, I don't. It is creepy.
It is very creepy.
You know how I feel about the term
"leaf peeping," it's very unclean.
We've got Doug Petcash in with us.
Are you a leaf peeper, my friend?
Don't accuse me of that.
You don't have to sneak up
on him or anything.
- It's not creepy or anything.
- No, it's not creepy.
- No, it's cute.
- Just leaf watching.
The leaves
will not be complaining.
The leaf peepers can get
their fix from coast to coast.
Stop laughing, Angela.
It's a real thing. Grow up.
Is that impacting
the fall foliage, Matt?
I know I'm putting you
on the spot here
as the resident
meteorologist-slash-leaf peeper.
I don't want that title.
Don't put that on me.
That's our show,
thank you so much for watching,
we'll see you next week,
good night!
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"!
I'm John Oliver. Thank you so much
for joining us. It has been a busy week!
And given the midterm results,
a pretty good week too!
Democrats won so big on Tuesday,
it was sometimes genuinely hard
to take all the positive results in.
In fact, just watch this party
celebrating James Talarico
winning his Senate race in Texas,
before the room suddenly realizes
that Gina Hinojosa
had won as governor there, too.
Yeah, that second piece of news
somehow made that room
bump their screams,
which were already at a level nine,
all the way up to "just won a Mazda
on 'Wheel of Fortune.'"
The results in Texas alone
were incredible.
Democrats won
in every statewide office,
including all four open seats
on the state Supreme Court,
and they flipped
the state house, too.
It was genuinely hard to believe
Texas had just turned blue.
There were videos of people
celebrating in the streets
and chanting
"fuck Greg Abbott" in bars,
but I think my favorite was this piece
of borderline performance art,
set to a Lana Del Rey song,
by a woman dressed in blue,
lying in the arms
of the Buc-ee's beaver.
He holds me in his big arms,
drunk and I am seeing stars,
this is all I think of.
That is perfect. If you are not
celebrating the blue wave
by reclining
like a swooning debutante
in the arms of a litigious gas station
rodent, you are doing it wrong.
Also, kind of nice to hear
a Lana Del Rey song
used as the soundtrack for a celebration
instead of for vaping in the dark.
But it went well beyond Texas,
there were so many incredible wins,
it was hard to even process them.
Because one second, you're realizing
Democrats will have 22 state trifectas.
Next, it hits you that New Hampshire's
newly elected senator
just thanked his husband
in his acceptance speech,
and that Deb Haaland is now America's
first female Native American governor,
while also, by the way,
being the first governor ever
to have dressed as Erling Haaland
for Halloween. That's huge!
And before that can sink in,
you remember Georgia just
elected Keisha Lance Bottoms,
the country's first
Black woman governor,
and Abdul El-Sayed
won in Michigan,
meaning all the hateful shit
thrown his way did not work,
and also that this woman imploded
her own political career for nothing.
Then you realize Susan Collins
lost too,
and decades of having to listen
to her
express "reservations" about something
before going ahead and doing it anyway
are finally fucking over!
Then it hits you, Elon Musk
wasted so much money!
The half a billion dollars he spent
to try and buy the election
just went up in flames faster
than the parked Cybertruck.
Speaking of which,
we also learned this week
he's ending production
of Cybertrucks,
which isn't technically an election
result, but kind of feels like one.
And amazingly, the good news
may not even be over yet,
as it looks increasingly likely
Democrats will pick up a Senate seat
in Alaska, as well as Mississippi.
They are still counting votes there,
but Scott Colom is ahead there,
and when he was told on Wednesday
that his rival, Cindy Hyde Smith,
appeared to have prematurely
declared victory,
he had a quintessentially
Southern response.
Scott, Senator Hyde Smith all
but declared victory last night.
I want
to get your response to that.
Bless her heart.
Bless her heart.
Okay, if you are not from the South,
you should know,
it is basically not possible to say
anything meaner than that down there.
"Bless your heart" was essentially
invented in the South
as a way to commit
legal murder on someone
without getting out
of your church pew.
I should say, Republicans did manage
to win some races on Tuesday.
In fact, you might remember,
we mentioned Anthony Constantino,
the sticker magnate
and pro-Trump rapper,
who'd spent 17 million dollars
of his own money
to run in a deep red district
in upstate New York.
Well, he very narrowly won,
and in response,
he gave an unhinged,
near-30-minute speech,
where he railed at the media
in the back of the room.
And just wait 'til the camera
pulls out at the end,
and you can see
who else was in the crowd.
You're a bunch of fucking assholes.
Look at that asshole right there.
Him. Look at that guy.
Take a picture of him.
You're a bunch of assholes.
Kay Lisa, another fucking asshole.
He's just an angry motherfucker.
Let me explain something to all of you.
How would you feel
if you just had to spend 17 million
because you guys
were a bunch of assholes?
You wouldn't be very happy.
My consultants are a little
stressed out right now.
They're like,
"We never heard this before."
It's okay,
it's a new day in America.
What are you doing, Anthony?!
There's a little child in front of you!
Someone should be
covering her ears,
and also, ideally, her eyes because
nobody, child or adult,
should ever be subjected
to the sight of this outfit,
which screams, "I just got physically
removed from the VMAs."
But the thing is, that wasn't all,
because Constantino's closing message
was a bold policy suggestion
that I promise you won't see coming.
I want to bring excitement
back to New York.
I want to bring jobs
back to New York.
And I got to say this,
I know it's already been asked,
but I think President Trump
should consider freeing Diddy.
This is a historic New Yorker that did
great things for New York state.
I think we should consider it.
That is clearly a wild thing
to suggest, but also,
how is a strategy for "bringing jobs
back to New York" freeing Diddy?
That's like saying, "Time to reverse
the decline in American manufacturing,
so let's let Roman Polanski
back in the country."
First, we are not doing that.
And second,
what do you think that guy does?
Look, there will clearly be more to say
about the midterm results going forward
and, by the way, the fact Trump's
appointed this sentient 4chan post
as his new chief of staff,
really putting to bed the idea
that he might moderate
in the slightest after this drubbing.
But for now, we're actually gonna dive
straight in with our main story tonight,
which concerns Pete Hegseth,
voted "Best Blowjob"
by Breathalyzer Magazine.
As secretary of war,
Hegseth's in charge of America's
largest government agency,
which employs over three million
service members and civilians,
and this year, had a budget
of over a trillion dollars.
He's also the guy you constantly see
trying to show off
by publicly exercising
with troops and recruits,
and to go by fitness experts on the
internet, not doing a great job of it.
Now, what you see here
are two of the most common
mistakes in kettlebell swings.
First is squatting too low
with a deep knee bend.
He's in more of a squat position.
A kettlebell swing
is supposed to be a hip hinge.
Why are you posting that?
Why did you let people see you
swing a kettlebell like that?
I've never seen someone be more
gentle in their kettlebell swing.
It looks like he's trying to do
some kind of ballet move,
which,
he could never fucking do ballet.
He does not have
the strength or stamina.
All this video is showing me is that
he's never sexually pleased a woman.
Like, bro, the kettlebell swing
is a hip thrust motion.
Where the fuck is your thrust?
Yeah, she's right.
And as a certified bell boy,
I couldn't agree more.
It's like I always say to my bros
down at the Kettle Korner,
if your hips ain't thrustin',
your glutes are rustin'.
For more tips like that,
just check out my workout video,
"Put the Kettle On:
Gettin' Jacked with Johnny O."
But when Hegseth's not actively
embarrassing himself with a kettlebell,
he's been lecturing the military on
all the changes he wants to make.
Here he is at this year's
State of the Force address,
where he made an audience
of about 600 rank-and-file troops
listen to some fun wordplay
with the occasional slur.
No more silly PowerPoint trainings
or drag queen shows.
No more diversity quotas,
no more gender pronouns,
no more identity months.
We are no longer the woke
department or the weak department.
Simple translation of that,
no fanny, no fatties,
no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos,
no wimps, no radicals.
Just warriors.
Okay, first, if you're gonna go
on stage and spew hate,
at least don't flub the delivery
like a middle schooler
about to lose his first rap battle.
But also, that is just pathetic.
It sounds less like
an inspiring piece of oratory,
and more like he's reading from a book
"Dr. Seuss for Concussed Bigots".
But unfortunately for Hegseth,
a man obsessed with optics,
from day one in his job,
things haven't looked great.
Early on,
there was the Signalgate fiasco,
where a journalist was inadvertently
added to a Signal group chat
about upcoming military strikes.
And more recently,
there's been the war in Iran,
which has been an utter fiasco
that's achieved none of this
administration's original goals.
Not only has there been
no regime change,
the Strait of Hormuz
is now under Iranian control,
and there seems to be
no easy way out of this conflict.
All of that
is pretty hard to spin away,
although, not for a lack
of Hegseth trying.
Some close to the president
have apparently expressed frustration
that he's not been honest about
the state of the war,
with one person saying,
"Hegseth is good at telling
the president what he wants to hear."
And while the Pentagon insists
that is "dead wrong",
it's not like we haven't seen him
try and sugarcoat things before.
In fact, just watch him
during the early days of the war,
literally trying to dictate more
flattering headlines to reporters.
Allow me
to make a few suggestions.
People look up at the TV and
they see banners, they see headlines.
"Mideast War Intensifies"
splashing on the screen
the last couple of days,
alongside visuals of civilians,
or energy targets that Iran has hit,
because that's what they do.
What should the banner
read instead?
How about,
"Iran Increasingly Desperate".
Another example of a fake headline
that I saw yesterday, "War Widening".
Here's a real headline for you
for an actual patriotic press.
How about, "Iran Shrinking,
Going Underground."
Look, that is clearly absurd.
Although it does kind of make me want
to read his preferred headlines about
other notorious historic disasters.
"Giant Zeppelin Provides
Much-Needed Warmth on Windy Day."
"Brave Tanks Stand
Tall in Front of Deadly Man."
"Luxury Cruise Passengers Receive
Refreshing Cold Plunge Experience."
Now, that was back in March,
and since then,
many seem to have run out
of patience with Hegseth.
In fact, in September, Republican
Representative Thomas Massie
moved to impeach him,
but Speaker Mike Johnson conveniently
sent lawmakers home early,
ensuring that an impeachment
resolution wouldn't be taken up
until after the midterm elections.
But guess what?
Tick tock, bitch,
the midterms are over.
So given that, tonight,
let's talk about Pete Hegseth,
the clear warning signs
he'd be a disaster in this job,
the damage he's already
done to the military,
and the irreparable harm he's
done to human beings overseas.
And let's start by acknowledging that,
to be fair to Pete Hegseth,
he has always sucked.
When he was an undergrad
at Princeton,
he was the publisher
of a conservative student paper
which ran, among other things,
a piece that he wrote
attacking the school's "gratuitous
glorification of diversity."
After college, he joined the Army
Reserve and National Guard,
but, tellingly,
never rose particularly far.
He didn't rise to a command position
where he would learn management,
joint forces operations,
or logistics,
and he never commanded
a task force or a detachment.
After leaving active duty,
he headed two different
veterans' advocacy organizations,
where he reportedly faced serious
allegations of financial mismanagement,
sexual impropriety
and personal misconduct,
including being
repeatedly intoxicated at work.
And while he has denied those claims,
some of them are truly dire,
with one former employee
describing Hegseth
being at a bar during a work trip and
drunkenly chanting "kill all Muslims",
while another report described a night
in which he had to be restrained
while drunk from joining the dancers
on the stage of a Louisiana strip club.
And if you are too drunk
to be in a Louisiana strip club,
a state where they have
drive-through daiquiri shops,
you have got a problem.
Eventually,
Hegseth landed at Fox News,
where he spent years
on their weekend morning show
doing dumb stunts like bull riding,
sumo wrestling,
and hitting himself in the crotch
with a skateboard.
He also, infamously, missed the target
during an axe-throwing demonstration.
And if you are thinking,
"Jesus, that axe could've hit
someone!" Guess what?
What you didn't see on-air is what
the axe hit, or should we say, who?
West Point marching band
member Jeff Prosperie
got hammered by the axe while the
other band members kept drumming.
Holy shit! If I can speak
to those other band members,
you do know you can stop drumming
if someone gets
an axe thrown at them, right?
Just pause for an eight count
and see if Jeff's all right!
It wasn't all "Jackass" lite. If you
look back at Hegseth's time on TV,
you can find plenty of troubling
evidence of his worldview.
He made frequent appeals
through his Fox News platform
for Trump to intervene
on behalf of service members
in three cases
involving war crime accusations.
And those efforts, both publicly,
and privately with Trump,
were ultimately successful.
And speaking of war crimes,
by the way, back in 2020,
when Trump was threatening
to destroy Iranian cultural sites,
Hegseth defended him on-air,
in some pretty breathtaking terms.
I don't care about Iranian cultural
sites, and I'll tell you why.
If they could, if Iran could,
if you understand
the Islamic Republic of Iran,
of Islamists, if they could,
if they had the power,
they would destroy every single one
of our cultural sites
and build a mosque on top of it.
That is not a great thing to hear
from the person currently overseeing
a war with Iran, is it?
Also, for what it's worth,
I highly doubt that Hegseth and I
could even agree on what America's
most important cultural sites are.
He's probably thinking about
a bunch of Confederate statues
and the first place his great-great
grandfather ever fucked a gun.
Whereas I'd be concerned with real
sites of U.S. cultural history
like the restaurant where Theresa
flipped the table and screamed,
"Prostitution whore!"
or Boston's majestic cop slide.
Oh, fuck!
It's still so good! That slide's
cultural impact is so huge,
it's even listed on Google Maps now,
so people from around the world
can go pay their respects to it.
But maybe the clearest articulation
of Hegseth's views on the military
came in a book that
he published in 2024
called "The War on Warriors",
about all the ways that "wokeness"
was apparently destroying it.
In the book, he likened DEI
to a "cultural Marxist revolution
ripping through the Pentagon"
and claimed it was impacting recruiting
to the point where, and I quote,
"America's white sons and daughters
are walking away" from the military.
A central incident in it
involves the fact
that when National Guard members
were called in
to help protect Biden's inauguration,
Hegseth was prevented from serving.
Now, he insists that that was because
he had an innocuous Christian tattoo.
In fact, here he is on a podcast
showing it off
and describing
what he claims he was told.
Right here. This one is…
what got me disinvited.
Someone inside the D.C. Guard
trolled your social media,
found a tattoo, used it as an excuse
to call you a white nationalist,
an extremist, and you were
specifically by name orders revoked
to guard the inauguration
because you are considered
"a potential threat".
How is that… it's a cross.
It's a Christian symbol.
That's all it is.
What an interesting story Pete
is telling there to a man
that, for some reason, sounds
like Marlon Brando in "The Godfather".
Just one thing, though, it wasn't
actually that tattoo that was the issue.
It was this one, reading,
"deus vult" or, "God wills it",
a Christian battle cry
from the first crusade
that's become popular among
white supremacist groups.
In fact, the sergeant who raised
those concerns about Hegseth
even clarified,
"Just so we are clear,
this has nothing to do with
the Jerusalem cross tattoo on his chest.
This has everything to do with the
'deus vult' tattoo on his inner bicep."
And while Hegseth denies that tattoo
has any connection to extremists,
it is telling that he goes out
of his way to pretend
that the issue was
with a different one.
And it's pretty hard to believe that
he got "deus vult" inked onto him
without having any idea
of its broader context.
It's not like when Ariana Grande
got this tattoo on her palm
that was supposed to say
"seven rings" in a Japanese script,
but which actually spells
"BBQ grill."
No. I think Hegseth probably
knew what he was doing.
And that's not the only
red flag in his past,
as Hegseth also has ties
to Christian nationalists.
He's a member of the Communion of
Reformed Evangelical Churches
and has praised its co-founder,
Doug Wilson, a far-right pastor
and self-described Christian nationalist
who, among other things,
wants to repeal
a woman's right to vote,
has called the immigration of Muslims
and Hindus to the U.S. "parasitic",
and believes homosexuality
should be a crime.
And while I could go on,
it might be easiest just to show you
the first 20 seconds
of one of Wilson's videos
because it pretty
neatly sums up his whole vibe,
before hard-cutting
to a very cool graphic.
Godly women
want to feed their men.
Godly women are designed
to make the sandwiches.
This is not an absolute law
like going about making babies.
And there are times when a man
fends for himself
and makes
quite a decent sandwich.
But in the general scheme of things,
the apostle Paul wants the women
to make the sandwiches.
I mean, that's clearly
a whole lot of nonsense,
from the completely ahistorical
understanding
of when sandwiches were invented,
to the phrase
"the natural use of the woman".
And even engaging with that level
of misogyny feels like a waste of time,
so instead let me respond like this:
Doug Wilson looks
like Santa on methadone.
He looks like someone
tried to pickle Jeff Bridges.
Are those his normal clothes,
or was that day's theme
"dress like a pedophile
reintroducing himself into society"?
And I've got some really bad news
for you, Old Saint Dickolaus,
a woman wrote all that.
In fact, she did such a good job,
I made her a sandwich.
And given Wilson is one of Hegseth's
spiritual thought leaders,
it probably won't surprise you
that this is how
he's talked about women in combat.
Women shouldn't be in combat at all.
Not at all.
They're life givers, not life takers.
I know a lot of wonderful soldiers,
female soldiers who have served,
who were great,
but they shouldn't be in
my infantry battalion. Not once.
Fuck you!
It is absolutely ridiculous to assert
that because women can give birth,
it makes them incapable
of practicing violence,
especially since I'm pretty sure
that if you said that
to any woman
who had just given birth,
she could and would rage ram
your head through a fucking wall.
And I'm gonna point out,
everything I've shown you
since Hegseth's college years
has been stuff he said and did
before the Senate voted
to confirm him as defense secretary.
As, by the way, is the fact
he'd paid 50,000 dollars to a woman
who accused him
of sexual assault in 2017,
an accusation he denies,
and the fact his own mother once
wrote him this pretty striking letter.
In a 2018 email to her son
obtained by the New York Times,
Penelope Hegseth wrote,
"On behalf of all the women,
and I know it's many,
you have abused in some way,
I say get some help
and take an honest look at yourself."
That's from his mom!
Most moms send emails like,
"Don't forget your sister's
birthday tomorrow,"
or "Here's the name of that
book I was telling you about"
or "Your dad can't get the Apple TV
to work, call us now!"
Not basically, "Fix yourself,
you sex pest. XOXO, Mom."
She apparently sent that email
when Hegseth and his second wife
were in the middle
of an ugly divorce.
And while she later claimed she'd
retracted it with an apology email,
its contents are truly damning,
given that she also wrote,
"You are an abuser of women.
That is the ugly truth
and I have no respect for any man
that belittles, lies, cheats,
sleeps around, and uses women
for his own power and ego."
"You are that man,
and have been for years,"
and "as your mother, it pains me
and embarrasses me to say that,
but it is the sad, sad, truth."
Which is pretty brutal.
Honestly, I don't know what
you're talking about, Pete,
with this whole
"women can't be life takers" shit,
because it seems your own mom
just took you the fuck out.
So, that is the guy Trump picked
to be secretary of defense,
despite, by the way,
nobody recommending him.
Apparently, Trump was presented
with a shortlist of names
of potential defense secretaries,
and asked, "Where's Pete?"
And when his advisors apparently
looked around confused,
Trump said,
"Pete Hegseth. I want Pete."
In fact,
he was such a left-field choice,
one defense lobbyist literally reacted
with, "Who the fuck is this guy?"
But unfortunately, the answer
to that question is now,
he's the guy who just spent
the last two years
taking a wrecking ball
to the U.S. military.
And to understand the depth
of the damage he's wrought,
it is worth starting with the thing
he seems utterly obsessed with:
the racial and gender makeup
of the military.
Because he's made
some sweeping changes,
like instituting a complete ban
on transgender military service.
That is something
that was understandably devastating
to the many trans service members,
like this one,
who'd dedicated their lives
to the military.
I served for 16 years. I missed
births, I missed several deaths.
I have some tattoos
that are memorial pieces,
because I was on deployment
and couldn't get away.
I dedicated everything,
all of my brain power,
my heart and soul,
to this organization
to now see that
they don't want me.
It makes me feel
not just replaceable,
but, like, lower than low, like trash.
Yeah, that's maddening.
And for the record,
the only person in this situation who
actually should be feeling like trash,
is this walking Jell-O shot with
a personality that, quite literally,
not even a mother could love.
But that trans service ban
was just the tip of the iceberg.
Because in keeping with his desire
for a "war on DEI",
Hegseth quickly made some
very high-level changes.
Take General CQ Brown,
a highly decorated command pilot
who made history as the first-ever
Black chief of a U.S. military branch.
He was nominated by Trump
during his first term,
and confirmed unanimously
by the Senate.
Brown eventually rose
to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
And that apparently infuriated Hegseth,
who wrote in his shitty book,
"Was it because of his skin color?
Or his skill?
We'll never know,
but always doubt."
Almost immediately upon taking
office, Hegseth removed Brown,
and did the same
with Admiral Lisa Franchetti,
the first woman
to lead the U.S. Navy.
And that was just the beginning
in what's been called a purge
of senior military officers
"on a scale unlike anything in
the modern history of the department."
Since taking office, Hegseth has fired
or blocked the promotions
of about 10%
of the military's top officers,
including at least 45 officers,
selected by boards made up
of peers, from promotion lists,
which is an incredibly rare thing
for a defense secretary to do.
And tellingly, more than half of those
officers have been female or Black.
So, for someone clearly obsessed
with rejecting woke identity politics,
he seems more than happy to inject
his own ideological leanings
deep into the department.
In fact, he even had Doug Wilson,
you know,
Mr. "God said make me a sandwich",
give a sermon
at the Pentagon in February,
and hired this guy, Ryan Higgins,
as a "senior faith adviser",
despite the fact
he has a history of offensive posts,
like this one from 2021.
They need to know
that abortion is murder.
They need to know that marriage
is between a man and a woman
and anything else is abominable.
They need to know that transgender
isn't something you choose,
but it's actually a mental disorder.
I would not trust that man
to be an advisor on anything,
not faith and certainly not facial hair,
because what the fuck is that?
It looks like he asked a middle schooler
to draw a penis on his chin.
He looks like Howie Mandel
as an undercover cop.
And the thing is, Higgins has continued
that rhetoric in the Pentagon,
posting things like referring
to the "satanic cult of LGBTQ"
and calling abortion
"demonic human sacrifice".
Yet not only has the Pentagon
kept him in his advisory role,
they've said he's a valued member
of the secretary's team
and does an outstanding job.
And even when Hegseth's personnel
decisions haven't been actively bigoted,
they've been unbelievably stupid,
with perhaps the dumbest
involving Kid Rock.
Very basically, back in March,
two Army helicopters deviated
from their training route
to do a fly-by at Kid Rock's house
in Nashville,
and he then posted a video of it.
That flight was unauthorized
and involved one
of the helicopters getting pretty low,
which is why then-Army chief
of staff General Randy George
supported a follow-up investigation
to see if any safety regulations
had been violated.
Although, when Kid Rock later
relayed that story to a local reporter,
he seemed pretty confident that
no one was gonna get in trouble.
Man, I was sitting right there,
just having, like, kind
of Saturday morning beer,
and I seen a chopper start coming.
I was like, man, it looks like military.
Then they circled back around
and came out right over here.
And so, I just, you know,
gave them a salute
and, you know,
kind of a thank you.
The military is, like,
looking into this to see
if they did this
for their own pleasure, I guess.
What do you have to say to that?
I think they're going to be all right.
My buddy's the commander-in-chief.
Listen, there is so much for us
to unpack there,
from the sudden zoom
into his mustache,
to the concept
of a Saturday morning beer.
But I want to take just a moment
on Kid Rock's house.
It turns out, it's not just a sick pad
with a Statue of Liberty by the pool.
He's actually branded it
the "Southern White House"
because he designed it
to look like this. Gorgeous.
It features framed, signed letters
from Donald Trump,
a golden U.S. Constitution,
a golden urinal,
a seven-foot-tall wood-carved
middle finger,
a convenience store-style
queso dispenser,
Rolling Stones and NASCAR-branded
pinball machines,
the sledgehammer that was used
to break down Osama Bin Laden's door
during the 2011 raid
on his compound,
and an indoor grotto
that he says
was built with Playboy Mansion-style
shenanigans in mind,
but now is mostly used when
his grandchildren come by
and want to go swimming indoors.
Basically, think of it
like Dollywood for dads
who only get you once a month.
But he was actually right about
the pilots not getting in trouble,
the investigation did get squashed,
mainly thanks to Pete Hegseth,
who terminated it himself
and exonerated the aircrews involved,
even proudly tweeting,
"Thank you, Kid Rock.
U.S. Army pilots suspension lifted.
No punishment. No investigation.
Carry on, patriots.
American flag emoji."
But here is a retired
Air Force brigadier general
explaining the problem with that.
So, I hate to be the fun-sucker, but
flight discipline is flight discipline,
and no violation
of flight discipline is okay.
You basically just said,
"Hey, pilot force,
if you want to fly by your mom's
house, that's cool with us."
And I watched people lose their
entire careers over that kind of crap.
And so, yeah, I get it,
it's Kid Rock, it's not good enough,
and I'm sorry, we need to be
a professional, disciplined force.
And when Hegseth says,
"Hey, don't worry about it,
no investigation, no punishment,"
I understand the spirit, but he doesn't
know what you know and what I know,
and that these things are big
and complex and dangerous…
And don't micromanage.
That's not your job.
You've got a lieutenant colonel down
there who can handle that perfectly.
Yeah, exactly. And that conversation
is taking place on Newsmax.
That's the network for people who think
Fox News is full of communists.
It is genuinely strange to see
a reasoned and measured take
from that network.
It's like seeing a donkey
correctly put on a condom.
Look, I'm glad
that you're being responsible,
I just didn't know
that you were capable of that.
Now, notably,
two days after Hegseth tweeted about
the investigation being dropped,
General George was fired, without
explanation, in a 15-second phone call.
While the Pentagon maintains that
had nothing to do with this incident,
the timing is pretty hard to miss.
Hegseth has now been responsible
for so many high-ranking officer
being fired, pushed out,
or walking,
it is honestly hard
to keep track of them all,
from General Christopher Donahue,
a decorated military leader,
who's been described
as a generational talent,
to three-star Lieutenant General
Brett Sylvia,
a highly regarded officer
and combat veteran.
Sylvia was accused of leaking
to the media
and forced to undergo
multiple polygraph exams.
But despite the fact the Pentagon
has not offered
any details or proof in support of
the leaking allegations, he was fired.
And that was pretty obviously
Hegseth's doing,
especially given that when Trump
was asked about Sylvia's firing,
he clearly had no idea
who he even was.
What proof do you have
Lieutenant General Sylvia leaked
classified information at the Pentagon?
On what?
Lieutenant General Sylvia leaked
classified information at the Pentagon!
She's got problems. She's gonna
have big problems. She did.
We're very much looking
for leakers.
And she's gonna have big problems.
Long-term problems.
Yeah, he just assumed
General Sylvia was a woman there.
Because of course he did.
How is Trump supposed to know
that generals don't tend to go
by their first names?
We all know
he never served in the military,
as during Vietnam, he came down
with a nasty case of the "don't wannas".
And the thing is, the vacuums left
by these high-level personnel changes
are going to be long-lasting.
Because it takes 25 years
to become an admiral or a general,
and that's just to get
your first star.
Four-star generals can take
an additional decade or more.
As one lawmaker has said,
Hegseth's purging a generation
of great leaders,
and it's going to take
a generation to recover from it.
So, that's how he's changed
the makeup of the military,
which would be bad enough.
But he's also trying to change
how it conducts itself,
by removing
some very important guardrails.
For one thing, at an address
to generals and admirals last year,
he basically said that when it comes
to combat, anything was gonna go.
We also don't fight
with stupid rules of engagement.
We untie the hands of our warfighters
to intimidate, demoralize,
hunt and kill
the enemies of our country.
No more politically correct and
overbearing rules of engagement,
just common sense,
maximum lethality
and authority for warfighters.
You kill people and break things
for a living.
You are not politically correct
and don't necessarily belong
always in polite society.
Truly, what the fuck
is he talking about there?
"You break things for a living
and don't necessarily belong
in polite society."
That is not a message for the military,
but for the fucking Minions!
In Hegseth's own words,
he apparently wants "maximum
lethality, not tepid legality."
And the Pentagon even tweeted,
"Low cortisol.
Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing."
Which I'm worried
might actually be too cool.
He's also taken multiple steps
to reduce any accountability
for those who might have
"overmaxxed their lethality."
For one thing, he's targeted
judge advocate generals, or JAGs.
Those are lawyers whose job it is
to make sure actions
taken by the military are legal,
and to prosecute service members
who break the law.
In fact, not long after taking office,
Hegseth fired the top JAGs
for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
But that's not all.
'Cause he also gutted a program called
Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response,
which among other things
worked to give military personnel
a more detailed picture of life
and locations in combat areas
in an attempt
to reduce civilian harm.
Which is something that you would
think you would want.
Yet Hegseth, over the objections
of his commanders, by the way,
stripped the program
of almost all its funding,
leaving only a handful of people
to carry out its mission.
And he did that because he apparently
felt focusing on civilian security
was "woke" and out of step
with "maximum lethality".
And unfortunately,
all of that brings us
to what Hegseth has used the military
to do over the last two years.
Because the first major operation
of his tenure
was the air campaign in Yemen
last spring that killed 153 civilians
and wounded 243 others,
an operation that he nonetheless
celebrated
as a "clear, limited mission executed
with ruthlessness, full stop."
And sadly, that dismissive approach
set the tone
for everything that has followed,
like Operation Southern Spear,
a series of strikes
starting last September
on boats allegedly carrying drugs
in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
And though there is still a lot
we don't know about those strikes,
the information that we do
have does not look good.
Military officials showed a group
of lawmakers video of multiple strikes
on a suspected drug boat
off Venezuela in September.
Two survivors
of the initial attack were killed.
You have two individuals
in clear distress
without any means of locomotion,
with a destroyed vessel
who are killed
by the United States.
The DOD's Law of War manual
states
that "shipwrecked combatants
are in a helpless state,
it would be dishonorable and inhumane
to make them the object of an attack."
Yeah, and that makes sense.
Generally, if someone is shipwrecked,
they're not a threat, are they?
It's one of the many reasons
why "Titanic" didn't end
with Jack and Rose getting blown
to shit by the U.S. Navy.
And while Hegseth maintains
those strikes were legal,
we haven't seen
the official justifications for them.
And experts are not so sure.
In fact, former military lawyers
have argued that if the U.S. were
at war with the traffickers,
as this administration's
tried to argue,
then killing the boat's occupants
would in essence be a war crime.
But if we're not at war with them,
then killing any of the men
in the boats "amounts to murder".
So, basically, your options are murder,
war crimes, or, by the way, both.
And again, even Newsmax
got squeamish about this.
Because here's former Fox analyst
Andrew Napolitano weighing in.
And it gives me no pleasure
to say what I'm about to say,
because I worked with Pete Hegseth
for seven or eight years at Fox News.
This is an act of a war crime,
ordering survivors
who the law requires be rescued
instead to be murdered.
There's absolutely no legal basis
for it.
Everybody along the line who did it,
from the secretary of defense,
to the admiral, to the people
who actually pulled the trigger
should be prosecuted for a war crime
for killing these two people.
Exactly.
That elderly werewolf is right.
If a coworker
of seven years does a war crime,
you kind of have no choice but
to publicly say so on the news.
I've worked with Mr. Nutterbutter
for over seven years now,
but if he ever found himself on trial
in Hague for using chemical weapons,
I'd have to denounce him.
I wouldn't like it, but it would be
the right thing for me to do.
But obviously, the major conflict
right now is the war in Iran.
And from the start,
it has been clear
that minimizing civilian casualties
just was not a priority.
Because on the very first day
of the war,
a strike hit an elementary school
in Minab,
killing more than 150 people,
including at least 123 children.
In the wake of that missile strike,
people tried to figure out
how that sort
of a mistake could happen,
and the answers that we've gotten
so far are just enraging.
Because while the site had once been
identified as a military base,
in the years since,
things had clearly changed,
and it was operating openly
as a school.
The signs of that
were visible for nearly a decade,
and they were pretty hard to miss,
given aerial images clearly show
a soccer pitch, line-up zones,
play area markings
and brightly painted walls.
In fact, the school even had
its own website
and was labeled on Google Maps.
And when you can use
the same technology
to find out that that's a school,
that you can use to locate
the fucking cop slide in Boston,
it feels like that's probably
something you should've done.
And look, I cannot say
that if Hegseth hadn't gutted
the Civilian Harm Mitigation program,
that it would've definitely
prevented that strike.
But this tragedy sure feels
like the symptom of a military
that seems to care a lot more
about "lethalitymaxxing"
than actual human beings.
And while I know this is rough,
it is worth hearing
what that strike did on the ground.
The school had gone.
There was only the smell
of smoke and children's hair.
I saw a hand, a foot.
They had been torn to pieces.
I called out to Setayesh,
"Where are you?
You were fasting…
You'll suffocate in this smoke."
Like many of the parents here,
her grief has become
intertwined with anger.
May Trump be destroyed.
May he drown
in the blood of these children.
May he be struck down
with suffering.
Yeah, that is utterly heartbreaking
and it was completely avoidable.
And being furious at the people
that did it makes complete sense.
But I also want you to hear
from this 11-year-old girl
who was in the school that day,
because the distinction that
she draws at the end of this clip
is just beyond generous.
When they hit the school, the entire
building shook from side to side.
The windows shattered.
Everything was shaking.
Hours later, Reyhaneh learned
that she had lost her little sister,
a first grader at the school.
Rayhaneh says she has hate in her
heart for what happened to her sister,
but not for the American people.
It's just the government
that's cruel and dirty.
Most people in America are good.
They know this is not right.
It is truly damning that an 11-year-old
is somehow displaying
more integrity and moral clarity
than Pete Hegseth has ever shown
in his entire fucking life.
And while I would love to say
that we are worthy of that level
of trust from her,
at this point,
I'm honestly not so sure.
Especially because all this
was completely foreseeable,
and yet Hegseth
was confirmed anyway,
which should be a lasting stain
on every single person who did it.
There is clearly damage here
that cannot be undone,
but the very least we can do
is try and stem it
by impeaching and removing this
fucking asshole as soon as possible
and ideally,
in a way that also ensures
he'll be barred from ever
holding future federal office.
Because it's not like
he is ever going to change.
In fact,
in the wake of Tuesday's election,
amid speculation he might be
about to be impeached,
Hegseth released a defiant video in
which he condemned the impeachment
and called the Iran war a "courageous
and historic" effort,
all while desperately
sucking up to his boss.
President Trump's War Department
has never been afraid to lead the way.
Just like the president,
we don't back down,
and that especially applies now.
You see, they attack me, they attack
us, because we are effective.
It's not gonna work.
We will not back down.
As always,
President Trump leads the way.
In service of our nation,
he has endured more
than anyone can fathom.
He literally took a bullet
for this nation.
He shook his fist and said,
"Fight, fight, fight." And so will we.
Okay, first, "took a bullet"
is a pretty strong term
for "got grazed
and needed an ear Band-Aid."
But that is also just embarrassing.
Nothing about that projects strength.
If anything, it has the energy
of Lefou sucking up to Gaston,
if Gaston got winded
climbing a small flight of stairs.
That is so far beneath the dignity
that Hegseth's office requires,
although depressingly, it's also pretty
much par for the course with him,
given our dealings
with the Pentagon this week
have at times felt like dealing
with a bunch of dickhead teenagers.
When we asked about Hegseth's
college condemnation of diversity,
their official response was,
"The secretary was and remains
absolutely correct on this topic.
He is very based."
And when we asked
if there was any other info
they felt was important for us
to know,
after all that we've talked
about tonight, they responded,
"Deport John Oliver.
Pentagon spokesman."
I know that when, hopefully,
Hegseth eventually gets impeached,
and kicked out of his job,
he'll probably just crawl
right back to Fox News
so he can host some shitty show called
"Battle Lines with Pete Hegseth",
where he'll do stunty bullshit
like playing beer pong with Kid Rock,
or dressing up as a bear and
trying to catch a salmon in his mouth,
or maybe finishing what he started
all those years ago
and finally axe-murdering
a marching band drummer.
But that will still be vastly preferable
to where he is now.
So, hopefully,
Congress will fix
what it never should've allowed
to happen in the first place
and remove him from office.
Because while I know Hegseth
desperately wants
the headline for his tenure
in the job to be
"Big Strong Manly Man Restores
Military, parentheses, White",
if I, like him, may suggest
a much more accurate headline,
I'd go with "Kettlebell Dipshit Ruins
Everything, parentheses, Mom Agrees."
And now, this.
The Continuing Saga of Newscasters
Versus the Term "Leaf Peeping".
They'll go to the Northeast,
they'll go to the UP,
they plan their trips
around peak fall foliage.
I get that, but they call it,
"I'm going leaf peeping."
They're going leaf peeping,
all of them, every single one.
Okay. It does sound kind of…
It's a clever way to phrase it.
I don't like
the saying "leaf peeping".
Do you like that saying,
"leaf peeping," Jen?
Yeah, I don't. It is creepy.
It is very creepy.
You know how I feel about the term
"leaf peeping," it's very unclean.
We've got Doug Petcash in with us.
Are you a leaf peeper, my friend?
Don't accuse me of that.
You don't have to sneak up
on him or anything.
- It's not creepy or anything.
- No, it's not creepy.
- No, it's cute.
- Just leaf watching.
The leaves
will not be complaining.
The leaf peepers can get
their fix from coast to coast.
Stop laughing, Angela.
It's a real thing. Grow up.
Is that impacting
the fall foliage, Matt?
I know I'm putting you
on the spot here
as the resident
meteorologist-slash-leaf peeper.
I don't want that title.
Don't put that on me.
That's our show,
thank you so much for watching,
we'll see you next week,
good night!