President Donald Trump’s renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War in September 2025 seemed like an empty gesture toward a more violent, offensive military. As time has told, it was a harbinger of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s comical crusade of military re-masculinization that has reached its breaking point.

The name change also began the chronicle of a boy who couldn’t be king – or in Hegseth's case – machismo militant dictator. 

Hegseth's latest display of hypermasculine leadership comes in the form of a planned live-streamed execution of the Fort Hood shooter, former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, by firing squad on Dec. 3. This act of public violence has drawn bipartisan criticism and proves that Hegseth's hubris – and the type of masculinity it represents culturally – is just vacuous evil. 

The masculine urge to regress

As we've seen with the manosphere – online spaces that........

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