Pete Hegseth’s Air Force Academy speech backdrop draws scrutiny: ‘Accidental Nazi is just not a thing’
An angular eagle behind the defense secretary departed from the Pentagon’s established branding. Critics saw echoes of the Third Reich.
A reimagined “Department of War” logo displayed behind Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a recent speech drew immediate comparisons to Third Reich iconography.
Speaking to Air Force Academy cadets on Saturday, Hegseth stood in front of a monochrome logo for his agency that differs from the designs in the Defense Department’s official branding guide. The backdrop features a stylized eagle that critics compared to the straight-edged Reichsadler used by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.
https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/pete-hegseth-nazi-backdrop?1Open linkView original on lemmy.world
14 replies
The DOD eagle is very close to the shape used, just with a slight swoop to the top of the wings.
Sometimes the wings have been pretty straight.
Both of those were taken from .mil pages. The major difference is in the straight horizontal feathers, which does match the Reichsadler.
It's questionable, but I don't think this is a slam dunk you take to your Fox News parents
If only they'd done any other deliberately Nazi-esque things you could include to prove a pattern of behavior.
Other than the guy standing in front of it, pretty well a duplicate
The dude with a swastika tattoo who's in charge of a fascist regime's military and just launched the new Reichsministerium für die Kirchliche Angelegenheiten had a logo redesigned to look like the Nazi eagle
...and someone thinks this is a coincidence?
It's not accidental, it's intentional.
Yuuup. I’m waiting for they stop pretending they’re not following the Hitler playbook.
Giving credit to others is not part of their modus operandi.
They’d spin it somehow I guess how they’ve been doing it. You’re probably right. They might not credit the man but they are gladly accepting the playbook.
Pretty sure you could have stopped waiting back when they put up concentration camps
I was listening to NPR this morning and they had a guy from Newyork who was taken to a concentration camp in Louisiana. He wrote a book about it.
https://www.npr.org/2026/09/29/nx-s1-5984966/mahmoud-khalils-104-days-in-ice-detention
Long before this he was showing signs.
Hail hydra i guess, issue is only the dumbest heads remain.
Not sure this is surprising given how ultra-nationalist both the 3rd Reich and Magats are.
Symbols are for the symbol minded. I care about fascist policy, not iconography. He could stand in front of a bust of Hitler for all I care just so long as he stops murdering fisherman, Iranian kids, and heroic drug smugglers.
1: all humans are "symbol minded" it's how language works.
2: that's stupid and dishonest and you're stupid and dishonest for saying it