Latest Hit Piece on Pete Hegseth Is Pure Desperation, But Also Not a Big Deal

Matt Vespa | May 12, 2025 7:00 AM

The obsession with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is approaching sexual harassment levels of creepiness from Democrats. You lost, guys. He’s not going anywhere. You couldn’t clip him during his confirmation hearings. You couldn’t topple him with that Signal Gate story that went nowhere. Even other little stories to that effect have sunk. No one believes the lying press, and it’s fantastic to watch.

A college newspaper has the latest attack against Hegseth: he might have plagiarized some parts of his senior thesis. The Daily Princetonian was on the case, though the story’s premise is undercut in the first few paragraphs. Also, who cares? He’s not resigning over this either [emphasis mine]:

“After Card’s whisper, Bush looked distracted and somber but continued to listen to the second-graders, joking that they ‘read like sixth-graders,’” reads the senior thesis authored by Pete Hegseth ’03, now the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
This sentence is notable for recapping the precise moment President George W. Bush was informed of the 9/11 attacks. But it is also notable because it is nearly identical to one published by The Washington Post in 2001, two years before Hegseth wrote his thesis.
“After Card’s whisper, Bush looked distracted and somber but continued to listen to the second-graders read and soon was smiling again. He joked that they read so well, they must be sixth-graders,” the story in The Post reads.
The article is not cited in Hegseth’s paper.
A review of Hegseth’s thesis by The Daily Princetonian, in consultation with three experts on plagiarism, found eight instances of uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying. But while the three experts all said that the passages violated Princeton’s academic honesty regulations, they differed on whether the violations were serious or too minor to matter.
“There’s no silver bullet here; there’s no smoking gun in terms of a deep example of plagiarism,” James M. Lang, the author of “Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty,” told the ‘Prince.’ “It’s a borderline case.”