This question has been gnawing at me for some time. Why does Pete Hegseth hate fishing boats and their crews? This rampage that he and the president have been engaging in against commercial fishing craft and their inhabitants aboard, especially those in the Caribbean and the East Pacific Ocean. has to have a trigger point. I have scoured the stories about the incidents, and my question still has not been answered.
Is it related to his childhood growing up in Minnesota, the “Land of 10,000+ Lakes?” Did he have a bad encounter with a drunk fisherman when he was young? Did he fall out of a fishing boat and almost drown? Or did he simply just eat some bad fish in his youth? The answer, I found, was no on all accounts. It must be another dark chapter of his life that has caused this untethered anger toward these individuals. I will not rest until this perplexing question is answered.
Hegseth’s Youth
Hegseth was born in Minneapolis, MN, and raised in Forest Lake, MN. Now Minneapolis is known as the “City of Lakes,” and the Forest Lake area has a bountiful amount of fishing lakes. Could the answer to my question lie with an incident in his youth? Unfortunately, this hunch led me down a dead-end street. A search of traumatic incidents from his teenage years came up empty.
From there, Hegseth moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Surely, his hatred for the fishing industry must date back to this formidable era of his life. I dedicated my time to investigating his entire college experience, searching for a clue to unlock the mystery. My findings: There were no recorded incidents of any conflicts he had with the university’s rowing team. And there was no information regarding any flare-ups Hegseth had with the lobster fisherman of the state. My quest would continue.
Military, Political Activism, and Media Career
Perhaps the answer resided in a hurtful experience he suffered while a member of the United States Army. Again, I combed through his military career searching for a tipping point for his hatred. But in researching his time in the army and later in the Minnesota Army National Guard, I was unable to find any incident he would have experienced that would have led to his disdain for the fishing industry. Undaunted, I pressed on for a solution to my quandary.
Hegseth left the military in 2006 and began a career working for various policy and veterans’ organizations. And although he helped bankrupt two veterans’ organizations and faced various charges of sexual harassment, drunkenness, and misuse of funds during this period, no mention is made of any dustups with any fishing enterprises.
In 2014, Hegseth joined Fox News as a regular contributor and later went on to become the host of Fox and Friends Weekend and Fox Nation. Again, during this period, there is no record of him reporting on negative maritime activities or prompting salacious attacks on the commercial fishing trade. He was too busy promoting false immigration stories, supporting Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy theories, and throwing axes at United States Military Academy drummers.
Hegseth’s Hatred
So, where does Pete Hegseth’s hatred of all things fishing stem from? It could be that we are searching too deeply and in the wrong places for the answer. Perhaps Trump’s and Hegseth’s motivation to destroy small fishing boats and their passengers is driven by an effort to bring regime change in Venezuela, as opposed to a war on drug trafficking, as the administration has claimed.
This little tidbit was dropped by White House chief of staff Susan Wiles during one of her numerous interviews with Vanity Fair. In the interview, Wiles said. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
Who am I to deny the claims of a person the president calls Susie Trump?
