Audience capture
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 175
CURRENT EVENTS DEP'T.
Who Were the Big War Speeches Meant For?
PETE HEGSETH WASN'T even talking to the generals and the admirals. He had flown them in from all around the world to be in the room while he was talking, but the things he said were not meant for the ears of a professional military audience. To a professional military audience, or to anyone even aware of the general contours of military professionalism, the words coming out of Hegseth's mouth were unbelievably asinine, things a particularly mean and dimwitted child might shout at a green plastic army man while melting it with his mom's cigarette lighter: "The only people who actually deserve peace are those who are willing to wage war to defend it"..."To our enemies: F—A—F—O"..."Lethality is our calling card and victory our only acceptable end state"...
We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.
We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.
Hegseth's talk about eliminating inclusion and diversity and professional accountability, and about focusing on killing, was all very real: trans service members have already been forced out; women and Black people have been purged from the upper ranks and from the service academies' curricula; the Navy is murdering civilians on the high seas. At the same time, though, it was also gratingly, ostentatiously fake. Pete Hegseth pretended to be the voice of military culture and sentiment on Fox, and Donald Trump put him in charge of the actual military, and he is doing the things that Donald Trump wants to see the top military man do.
Reporting on the speech, the New York Times wrote:
Mr. Hegseth delivered his speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Northern Virginia clad in an American flag belt buckle and standing in front of a giant American flag. The backdrop mirrored the portrayal of Gen. George S. Patton in the 1970 movie bearing his name.
But despite the obvious visuals, Patton wasn't the first thing Hegesth's performance brought to my mind. What it evoked instead was a video that was going around the internet last week, showing a woman berating an employee at a Starbucks. The woman was upset because—this was the literal substance of the complaint—the employee had brought her drink order to her table and set it down there, in person, rather than calling the customer to come up to the front and fetch it.
The customer took offense because she had ordered the particular mint tea Starbucks drink that the late Charlie Kirk had said was his beverage of choice, and she had left her name at the counter as "Charlie Kirk," expecting that the clerk would call out "Charlie Kirk" for everyone at the Starbucks to hear—or, more likely, hoping that the clerk would not call out "Charlie Kirk," so that she could make a scene.
In the video, the customer repeatedly declared that her "free speech" had been violated, because she had not been able to coerce a service employee into speaking the name "Charlie Kirk" out loud—because, again, the clerk had given the customer an extra degree of personalized service instead. Eventually, after the customer expanded the argument to embrace another patron who had told her to stop yelling at the staff, and after the staff had withstood the yelling with the unflinching courtesy and composure of people who know they will be mobbed on the internet and probably fired if they show anger, the manager ordered the customer to leave.
As with Hegseth yapping out his aggressive would-be applause lines to a hall full of silent military commanders, the Starbucks spectacle was created on purpose. The video existed and was on the internet because the ranting customer had recorded and uploaded it herself. She was proud to have acted that way in the Starbucks, to have been screaming at strangers about pointless esoterica. Charlie Kirk fans were going out and doing the mint-tea thing and recording themselves doing it because they presumed—they knew—that everyone in America had to be aware that the Starbucks mint tea had been Charlie Kirk's favorite drink, and by extension everyone would understand that their Starbucks orders were therefore not only a tribute to, but a sort of transubstantiation of, the dead racist podcaster, and that any failure to play along was essentially blasphemy, if not desecration of a corpse.
The idea that people didn't know who Charlie Kirk was before he was shot, let alone know his standard beverage order, belonged to some other realm. "You might say we're ending the war on warriors," Pete Hegseth told the generals and admirals. "I heard someone wrote a book about that." This was a joke about The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, published in 2024 by then-TV personality Pete Hegseth. The audience was supposed to get that.
But which audience? Not the stubbornly silent military commanders, really, nor the American public at large. Hegseth was addressing a separate, chosen audience, the audience that wants to hear the Secretary of Defense call himself the "Secretary of War" and to hear him declare an end to "dudes in dresses," saying "we are done with that shit"—the audience for whom he posts, to official government social media, video of himself doing "regular hard PT."
It's the same audience that the FBI director is serving when he posts a photo of ammunition from a crime scene in the middle of an investigation, or that the Secretary of Homeland Security is serving when she has a cage full of prisoners strip off their shirts for a photo opportunity while she flaunts an expensive watch. It's the audience for "Alligator Alcatraz" and face-masked ICE squads and sadistic cartoon memes—some aggregate audience on the far side of a screen, looking for stimulation, for more of the same, only stronger. The people who wield power in this country, and the people who support and emulate them, no longer conceive of themselves as existing a real world of real human behavior and conduct and standards. That's all just the backdrop for the content.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 30, 2025
★★★★★ The high layer of cloud looked unimportant at first, thin enough to leave blue shining through. Then the eye picked up strange whiter bands on it, like blurred and curving contrails, and a bright smear of light with the spectrum at its eastern side. As more and more of the sky came into view, the phenomena resolved: a full 22-degree halo projected around the sun, with a rainbow on its inner edge—and out beyond that, a fainter 46-degree halo—and intersecting those, girdling the entire heavens in white, not a mere circumzenithal arc but a full, intact parhelic circle. The sun strengthened till the day was hot and it was difficult to look toward the halos, but the huge ring inscribed around the zenith stayed clear and white as its background grew bluer and bluer. The balcony in the afternoon, under a sky free of visible geometry, was haunted by mosquitoes. The ninth-grader came home with a photo of the rainbow halo on his flip phone. Toward sundown in the Park, a glimpse of rust color in the ebbing light revealed the lawn to be almost upsettingly full of robins, the way the first flash of a firefly suddenly announces the swarm of others hanging near-invisibly all around. The moon was the tiniest bit of convexity past being a perfect half, shining in a sky that seemed to be dimming routinely blue to indigo, until the cloud layer, having gone inconspicuous again, reasserted itself in a wash of pink over everything.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from British Everyday Cookery, published by Whitcombe and Tombs in 1910 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
SHRIMP SANDWICHES.
1/2 pint picked shrimps, 4 eggs, 1/2 teacup milk, 1 oz. butter, cayenne, and 2 teaspoons of curry powder.
Boil the eggs hard and pound the yolks fine. Chop up the whites, not too small. Mix the butter and curry powder smoothly, place in a small pot, and add the milk and let it nearly boil. Take from the fire and stir in the yolks and the shrimps. Season with cayenne if desired hot. Turn on to a plate and mix in the whites of the eggs and place between buttered slices of brown bread.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
