SHALL LONG ENDURE? Hegseth, furious, out on the tarmac!

TUESDAY, MARCH 25, 2025

Can some such nation endure? There he stood, furious again, this time on the tarmac.

Except for people programmed by the Fox News Channel, no one believes what he said. We refer to the furious Pete Hegseth, who is today this failing nation's Secretary of Defense. 

Yesterday, it didn't go all that well for the furious fellow. Even within the roster at the Fox News Channel, some major players were rolling their eyes at the obvious inaccuracy of what the furious fellow said. 

To read the text of Brit Hume's eyeroll, you can just click here.

Listen up! We're so old that we can remember watching Hegseth at his previous post. We recommend pity for someone so lost, but we're referring to the days when Hegseth was still serving as co-host of the existentially dangerous "cable news" program known as Fox & Friends Weekend.

He served in that post for seven years, starting in 2017. Last November, on election day, Hegseth was still serving in that post. On November 12, he left Fox News after being nominated for his current job.

Yesterday, the furious fellow stood on the tarmac. Everyone knows his claims were untrue—and of course, he was issuing unsupported insults.

HEGSETH (3/24/25): So, you’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the—I don’t know, the hoaxes of "Russia, Russia, Russia." Or the "fine people on both sides" hoax. Or the "suckers and losers" hoax. 

So this is a guy that peddles in garbage. This is what he does.

You can watch the videotape of the battery of insults simply by clicking here. At the present juncture, this is the nation we've chosen.

At any rate, that's what Hegseth said yesterday as he angrily issued a set of denials everyone knows to be false. Everyone except such people—such neighbors and friends—as get their understandings from the "cable news" TV shows aired by the Fox News Channel.

One such program is Fox & Friends Weekend, where the furious fellow once served.

This past Sunday, we monitored the first hour of the program in question, as we do on every weekend morning. On this occasion, we continued to watch right up through the first few segments of the program's 7 o'clock hour.

According to our notes, we first flashed on President Lincoln at 6:28 a.m. We'd already seen co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy mockingly refer to Governor Walz as "Tampon Tim." 

As the videotape shows, that happened at 6:11 a.m. We hadn't yet seen Campos-Duffy reveal her pious side. 

As we noted yesterday, she surprised us with that performance at 6:49 a.m. As we noted yesterday, here's what we saw, to our surprise, at that point in time:

All right. Well, with help from the Hallow app, we're going to continue our Sunday prayer series with a prayer from the Hallow app. 

If you'd like to join me, you can just bow your head, and we'll start:

"Lord, thank you for the gift of life. You are a faithful father. You never abandon us in our time of need..."

Her reading of the prayer continued from there. As you can see by clicking this link, the text of the prayer appeared on the screen, underneath this heading:

PRAY EVERY DAY THIS LENT
               on Hallow

At 6:50, the prayer cut to a commercial for the Hallow app. Before the commercial ran, a moderator's voice said this:

Fox & Friends Prayer Series is brought to you by Hallow, the number 1 prayer app in the world. 

We'd never heard of the Fox & Friends Prayer Series! For that reason, were surprised by that statement, but also by what we had seen. 

As we noted yesterday, there's nothing wrong with people engaging in Sunday morning prayer. There's nothing wrong with people engaging in prayer on any day of any week.

There is something a bit unusual about a major American "news channel" presenting such activity as part of one of the channel's major news programs. And as we noted yesterday, the Hallow app is an explicitly Catholic prayer site. 

Subscribers can access the daily prayer for $69.99 per year. 

As such, this program's ongoing link to the Hallow app isn't merely a move to the adoption of the religious. It's an explicitly sectarian move—a move to a Catholic site.

Stating the obvious, there's nothing wrong with being Catholic! According to the leading authority on the subject, "With 23 percent of the United States' population as of 2018, the Catholic Church is the country's second-largest religious grouping after Protestantism."

We were raised Catholic ourselves! Today, something like one quarter of our neighbors and friends—one quarter of our fellow citizens—identify as Catholic.

There's nothing wrong with being Catholic, or with Catholic prayer! There's also nothing wrong with establishing a Catholic cable channel. Indeed, that has already been done, as is completely appropriate:

EWTN

The Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) is an American basic cable television network which presents around-the-clock Catholic programming. It is the largest Catholic television network in America, and is purported to be "the world's largest religious media network," (and according to the network itself) reaching 425 million people in 160 countries, with 11 networks.

The network was originally founded by Mother Angelica PCPA, in 1980 and began broadcasting on 15 August 1981 from a garage studio at the Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama, which Mother Angelica founded in 1962. She hosted her own show, Mother Angelica Live, until health issues led to her retirement in September 2001. 

[...]

News coverage

The EWTN news department produces a daily news service for television and radio, featuring news sources including Vatican Radio...Tracy Sabol is currently the lead anchor of the network's nightly news program, EWTN News Nightly...

It also produces The World Over Live, which reports current events. Journalist and author Raymond Arroyo, who is EWTN's news director, hosts the program. The program is conservative in its political orientation and generally conservative in its religious orientation. 

EWTN has been an explicitly (conservative) Catholic channel for more than 43 years. There's no obvious reason why it shouldn't be. 

For the record, we included the material about Raymond Arroyo for a specific reason. Arroyo, a generally genial fellow, isn't just the news director at EWTN.

Arroyo is also a "Fex News contributor!" For better or worse, he offers (MAGA friendly) humorous commentary on a regular basis on the primetime program, The Ingraham Angle. 

To watch his jocular segment from last night, you can just click here. For whatever reason, this regular segment carries the name SEEN AND UNSEEN. Last night, the jocular fellow was soon saying this:

ARROYO (3/25/25): Look at this clip from Texas, showing a group of Democrats who are definitely farting harder, complete with animatronics...

Arroyo is brought on the air to offer thoughtful analyses of that type. In this way, we see the Fox News Channel turning more and more to comedy elements as a way to peddle its propaganda to its (many) viewers.

We also see the channel perhaps becoming somewhat Catholic, a somewhat unusual stance for an American "news channel."

Back to Sunday morning! According to our notes, we first flashed on President Lincoln at 6:28 a.m. 

As we noted yesterday, we'd already seen Campos-Duffy make a mocking reference to "Tampon Tim." We'd already seen acting co-host Lisa Boothe respond by wondering if Governor Walz is really "just that evil."

A few minutes later, Boothe was identifying another situation in which unnamed FBI officials are engaged in "pure evil." Under current arrangements, Campos-Duffy identifies the Communists, Marxists, socialists and pagans. When Boothe appears, she tosses the E-word around in a way which takes her beyond the boundaries observed by the typical Fox co-host.

This is the culture we've (implicitly) chosen. Moving right along:

When we flashed on Lincoln this Sunday morning, we thought of the question he raised at Gettysburg, at the start of a famous address. 

It was November 19, 1863. According to one rendering, this is the way he started:

The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 

President Lincoln didn't know if a nation like ours could "long endure." In our view, the sheer stupidity of today's American discourse raises that question again.

In our view, the work on MSNBC has been substantially flawed in recent years. In our view, what happens on the Fox News Channel is orders of magnitude worse.

The sheer stupidity of that channel strikes us as an existential threat to the American project. Can a modern nation expect to survive such a braindead corporate onslaught? Can some nation so afflicted expect to "long endure?"

Then too, there's the monster cluelessness of our own Blue America. Can we hope to "long endure" in the face of that shortfall? During Sunday morning's 7 o'clock hour, we were brought face to face with that question, as we'll explain later in the week

Yesterday, the former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host was furious out on the tarmac. 

His angry denials were plainly bogus. He's been like this for a very long time. At this site, we wish he could do better, but it seems fairly clear that he can't.

We were surprised on Sunday morning for a particular reason. We've been sampling Fox & Friends Weekend for several years, but we'd never heard of "The Fox & Friends Prayer Series." We'd never heard of it even once!

A remarkably pious co-host seemed to say it's a continuing series. We wondered how long it's been going on. Tomorrow, we'll try to tell you.

Our overall view would be this:

We regard Fox & Friends Weekend as a study in anthropology. It's a study in human capability, and in the stunning shortcomings of same.

The program is a study in our actual human nature—in our actual moral and intellectual capabilities. So is the agreement, observed all through Blue America, to pretend that this dangerous corporate clown car simply doesn't exist.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Can a modern nation, behaving this way in a vicious and Putinesque world, expect to "long endure?" 

Tomorrow: Nicholson in Chinatown, Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut

Coming: Thanks to us in Blue America, Fox News hosts get to be right!