If the email from Pete Hegseth’s mom is real, my heart goes out to him. A toxic, unloving, terrible parent is a heavy burden. That he’s even functional, let alone successful, and not lying under a bridge strung out on heroin is a testimony to his great strength of character.
Does anybody know who leaked the email? How did it become public?
These seems a perverse take. Expressing an opinion, privately, to one’s son condemning his abuse of women is appropriate, the right thing to do. Moreover, the mother was not the one who leaked the email to the Times; had she done so, she would have perhaps opened herself up the kind of criticism you level at her. (My guess is that Hegseth’s second wife, whom he was divorcing, leaked it, but who knows.) Finally, according to the NY Times, the Mom said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce.”
It was wrong for you to condemn this person.
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I grew up with an abusive mother. I know what it looks like. They always abuse you in private. To the public, they show a completely different face, which is why it’s impossible to explain to anybody what’s being done to you.
How is it normal to do something like this to your own child when, in your own words, he’s going through a very difficult time? But that’s how such parents act. They find a moment when you are down and pummel you precisely because you are too weak to resist.
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Yes, it does. If your parents talk to you like this, IT’S NOT NORMAL. You don’t have to accept it. This is not OK. You can seek help, for real.
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I just don’t see this deep psychological burden of the toxic parent that might have lead to heroin. Or someone who’d be crippled by shaming.
Whatever the truth, she must have realized her words were an indictment of her failures as a mother, even knowing adults are responsible for their own actions.
I was raised to believe you only get married once and divorce is a failure. And further, you don’t knock up/get knocked up by a fresher model to exit ramp your marriage without regard to your existing children. Which he did twice. And truly conservative people live by this. But I’m aware that’s not most conservatives’ values.
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Now imagine that you are going through a difficult time and this is your mom addressing you. Not supporting, not comforting, not understanding, not being there for you but insulting, haranguing and degrading.
Or if you have children, imagine your child going through something, and you use that opportunity to screech and insult. Instead of feeling their pain, you feel self-righteous and entitled to hurl insults. At your own child. How is that even a possibility?
And honestly, a mom who sides with a daughter-in-law over a son? Whoever met such a phenomenon? She’s his mom. He should be her golden boy, her hero, her biggest joy, her sunshine. As Freud said, the universe looks at a man through the eyes of his mother. The adoring gaze of the mother is the fuel that is supposed to carry him through life.
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In general, not only is my mother capable of saying such things but my late grandfather would. My mother says she feels embarrassed at the drop of a hat, so I don’t care as much any more but if my grandfather had started calling me on the carpet like that I would feel really badly. And think about it. Because it would be a brief and he would lay out the reasons in order. He was very morally upright and his father was even more severe. And they absolutely would be coordinated to to say and do whatever to prevent a divorce. They would lean on the daughter in law and the son and get the siblings in law involved. But the real emotional power belonged to my late grandmother. She doted, she really didn’t say anything remotely harsh, but everyone scrambled not to disappoint her.
Love is absolutely the best way to be a figure of authority in the family. Your grandmother sounds like an amazing woman. You must take after her. 🙂
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It seems like the main problem is that our interpretations of the situation are different.
You cannot conceive of him being more in the wrong. And I think that a mother that sides with her abusive son over the daughter-in-law he is abusing is a bad mother and a bad human being.
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He can be completely in the wrong but not to his own mom. The whole point of having relatives is that to them we are always in the right, always the best, the smartest, the cutest, the most wonderful.
Do you have relatives? Or friends? Aren’t they always on your side in every situation because that’s the whole point?
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It’s best done in person and not by email, too.
Although parent to adult child, I don’t see the point. She had her chance at raising him. If she failed, it’s kind of way too late to raise a grown man with a family of his own.
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Biden pardoned Hunter today. According to your logic, he should have publicly disowned him instead.
Biden did what any remotely normal parent would do.
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Both my spouse and I have received long emotional emails from our mothers. In my personal experience, it is not unusual for relatives or close friends to put things in writing. This email clearly came in the context of everything that happened before, all the interactions between the mother and the divorcing spouses and other conversations.
I disagree with your point about relatives. I understand what sense you’re making it in, that they’re the people who are supposed to support you through life. But, to me, your true friends are also people who will tell you the truth. If they see you making mistakes and hurting yourself and others over and over again, they will tell you that.
Hegseth, this is an adult man, not a 4-year-old boy. He has children of his own who are affected by his behavior. Bitter divorces are bad for children. Parents abusing each other is bad for children.
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We all know that in a divorce both spouses are to blame for mismanaging the relationship. But if a friend comes to you during a divorce, I don’t for a second believe that you’d discuss this obvious truth with them. No, you’ll offer comfort and support and when the dust settles and the friend is ready to analyze their own responsibility for what happened, you’ll be there to hear them out. But I don’t for a second believe that you’d excoriate and name call. And if you do need to deliver an unpleasant truth to a friend, you’d do it gently and kindly. And not vituperate a person you care about.
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I don’t want to keep arguing but want to respond since Clarissa went to the trouble of typing a response:
“We all know that in a divorce both spouses are to blame for mismanaging the relationship. But if a friend comes to you during a divorce, I don’t for a second believe that you’d discuss this obvious truth with them. No, you’ll offer comfort and support and when the dust settles and the friend is ready to analyze their own responsibility for what happened, you’ll be there to hear them out. But I don’t for a second believe that you’d excoriate and name call. And if you do need to deliver an unpleasant truth to a friend, you’d do it gently and kindly. And not vituperate a person you care about.
“
Yes, you are correct about the responses I should have in the scenarios you are describing. I have tried to be supportive of friends and relatives in the past and will try my best in the future.
I don’t think the scenario Hegseth’s mom wrote this email in is similar. I can see it coming after multiple supportive conversations with an abusive son refusing to see his faults. In such a scenario, it’s normal. And in other scenarios, it’s coming from an abusive parent.
I hope we can at least agree on these multiple possibilities existing without agreeing on their likelihood and end there.
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Let’s say this identical letter was written by Trump to his daughter. Would you say, “what a great, caring father” or “what an evil old man”?
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“This email clearly came in the context of”
Ineffective or abusive relationship.
One (of many) red flags in the email “The way you made X feel today”.
Basic principle: no one can make you feel anything. Behavior can influence your emotions but X is ultimately responsible for their own feelings.
The overall meta-message of the email is very clearly “I’m better than you, you miserable excuse for a son” and a lot of it is just cataloguing the ways she feels superior to him.
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“imagine that you are going through a difficult time and this is your mom… not supporting, not comforting, not understanding”
Some people confuse ‘negative message’ with ‘abuse’ they are separate things.
Any negative message can be conveyed in a non-abusive way. But this woman chooses verbal abuse and in the first few paragraphs there are half a dozen or so examples.
Anyone can have a bad day when they write something in the rush of emotions that they don’t mean or regret. This isn’t that. The evidence is that she’s been like this for a long time.
I have no idea who this Hegseth is (and for all I know he might be a nasty sob in private) but if he was and if the goal was to change that behavior, that email is not the way to go about it.
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Exactly. It’s not likely this is something she never did before. The whole tenor of their relationship is one of hectoring and disappointment.
There’s absolutely no scenario under which I’ll address my child like this or even imagine the possibility. She’s my child. She’s the best person on the planet because of that.
“not likely this is something she never did before”
The frequent references to ‘don’t throw that in my face’ or “go ahead and call me….” or “you don’t deserve to know….” all indicate that this is a go-to method of communication for her and that she’s not remotely interested in what he thinks.
Unconditional love doesn’t mean an unconditional cheerleader who acts as if you never did anything wrong. Not for an adult.
Hegseth’s mom’s email’s tone, Hegseth’s parents’ parenting; is besides any point. Regardless of his marriages — this is not a man who should be second in command of the US military unless he’s in charge of running it into the ground. He was an abject failure at running the political organizations he was in charge of.
There is no indication this guy is in recovery, and is sober.
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Unconditional cheerleader is absolutely the only role for parents of adult children. And you know why? Because nobody else will do that for you. You have the rest of the world to punish you for your mistakes and offer retribution. Your parents are the only ones who can and should see you as flawless. You are the result of them. They should ask themselves what they did wrong to cause what you are.
As for running the military into the ground, is that the same military that recently ran away from Afghanistan in a pathetic spectacle that’s nothing short of embarrassing? The same military that won no wars since the 19th century? The same one that was turned into a guinea pig lab for medical experiments? I struggle to imagine how it can possibly get much worse than what we’ve seen when just since the beginning of this century.
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I’m not basing my opinion on that email at all.
In fact, under his leadership, V.F.F. soon ran up enormous debt, and financial records indicate that, by the end of 2008, it was unable to pay its creditors. The group’s primary donors became concerned that their money was being wasted on inappropriate expenses; there were rumors of parties that “could politely be called trysts,” as the former associate of the group put it. The early sympathizer said, “I was not the first to hear that there was money sloshing around and sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace.”.…
Meanwhile, the finances of V.F.F. grew so dire that the group’s donors hatched a plan to take control away from Hegseth. The donors’ representatives hired a forensic accountant to review the books. The findings were appalling. In January, 2009, Hegseth sent a letter to the donors admitting that, as of that day, the group had less than a thousand dollars in the bank and $434,833 in unpaid bills. The group also had run up credit-card debts of as much as seventy-five thousand dollars. Hegseth said that he took full responsibility for the mess, but added that, unless the donors gave him more funds, V.F.F. would have to file for bankruptcy and close down.One of the group’s backers initially agreed to Hegseth’s request. But, according to the early sympathizer, the donors decided, “Let’s shut this thing down. Pete can get another job.” The donors, who were strong supporters of America’s military role in Iraq and Afghanistan, arranged for another veterans’ group, Military Families United, which represented Gold Star families, to merge with V.F.F. and take over most of its management. “We tried to castrate him,” Hegseth’s former associate admitted. “It was a handoff.” Annual federal tax filings for V.F.F. show the group’s coffers draining and Hegseth’s compensation dwindling. In 2010, the records show, Hegseth was identified as the group’s “Executive Director/President” and was paid forty-five thousand dollars for thirty hours of work a week. The next year, he was identified as the group’s “officer,” and paid a salary of five thousand dollars for thirty minutes of work a week. In 2012, the tax filing again identified him as the group’s “officer,” and his compensation rose to eight thousand dollars, but the total grants received by the group that year totalled a mere eighty-one dollars.Margaret Hoover, a Republican political commentator and political strategist who worked as an adviser to V.F.F. between 2008 and 2010, recently told CNN that she had grave concerns about Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon, the largest department in the federal government, given his mismanagement at V.F.F. “I watched him run an organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors. The organization ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.” Hoover stressed that V.F.F. was an exceedingly small organization, with fewer than ten employees, and a budget of between five million and ten million dollars. She told CNN, “And he couldn’t do that properly—I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-seven-billion-dollar budget and three million individuals.”…
In 2012, Hegseth formed a political-action committee, MN PAC, to help like-minded candidates, but, according to a report by American Public Media, a third of the funds in Hegseth’s PAC was spent on parties for his family and friends, and less than half was spent on candidates.In 2014, Hegseth joined Fox News, as a contributor. By then, he also was the C.E.O. of the Kochs’ Concerned Veterans for America group. But by 2016 Hegseth had been forced to step aside from the organization. “There’s a long pattern, over more than a decade, of malfeasance, financial mismanagement, and sexual impropriety,” Hegseth’s former associate told me. “There’s a fair dose of bullying and misinformation, too.”
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Dude. It’s from The New Yorker. What’s next, consulting Patrushev for an honest opinion on Putin?
Just the use of the words “bullying” and “misinformation” throw up red flags larger than downtown Toronto. We’ve already seen a fake rape accusation against Hegseth and now they are really scraping the bottom with “bullying.”
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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