During a discussion on the necessity of the Senate’s role in advising and consenting to cabinet appointees on MSNBC’s Friday edition of The Beat with Ari Melber, activist and lawyer Maya Wiley took a bit of a detour to attack Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth for allegedly having “white supremacist and extremist tattoos.”
Wiley declared, “We should also say, one of the things that's so important in this function, in this role, is the people of this country should have some understanding of who is going to be making decisions about their daily lives because let's remember.”
As an example, she focused on “Hegseth and his white supremacist and extremist tattoos on his body, he is also a person, if he is in this job, who will be having the discussion with Donald Trump about sending the military into communities to police U.S. citizens.”
This was the second night in a row someone on MSNBC called Hegseth a white supremacist. On Thursday’s All In with Chris Hayes, former NAACP Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill declared Hegseth is “someone who, you know, is known to be a white supremacist, known to be an extremist. Whose platform, whose book is basically about his opposition to the advancement of black officers to the top brass, and the military is actually a very important area for black advancement.”
Even Hayes, who preferred to talk about Hegseth’s lack of administrative experience, was uncomfortable with that, “he says, because he was identified as an extremist, in part because of those tattoos. He thinks it’s crazy. I just want to, like, give the full side of the story here.”
However, here Melber and fellow panelist Bill Kristol just sat there and said nothing, but back in the day, Kristol even appeared in a Hegseth for Senate video. The tattoos in question refer to depictions of a Jerusalem Cross and the words “Deus Vult” (God wills it). Both are Crusade-era symbols that are over 900 years old. Some say those have been co-opted by white supremacists, but even if Kristol and Hegseth have diverged on Trump, Kristol could have at least stood up for Hegseth’s character.
As it were, Wiley added, “the United States of America's based on some transparency and accountability and checks and balances, and if we throw them out the window, to Bill’s point, it's not only that it offends the Constitution but we will feel that pain, that danger and that lack of protection in our daily lives.”
Even if white supremacists have co-opted the same symbols and phrases depicted in Hegseth’s tattoos, why does MSNBC want to give them the power to appropriate nearly a thousand years of history?
Here is a transcript for the November 15 show:
MSNBC The Beat with Ari Melber
11/15/2024
6:19 PM ET
MAYA WILEY: And we should also say, one of the things that's so important in this function, in this role, is the people of this country should have some understanding of who is going to be making decisions about their daily lives because let's remember, like when we are talking about the secretary here and Hegseth and his white supremacist and extremist tattoos on his body, he is also a person, if he is in this job, who will be having the discussion with Donald Trump about sending the military into communities to police U.S. citizens.
This is something that Donald Trump has said explicitly. It's a power he has wanted to use. It's one of the warnings we heard from the joint chiefs in his administration when he was president before, and it's in Project 2025. And so it's not just that position. It's also health and its implications for people's daily lives. But the United States of America's based on some transparency and accountability and checks and balances, and if we throw them out the window, to Bill’s point, it's not only that it offends the Constitution but we will feel that pain, that danger and that lack of protection in our daily lives.
