U.S. Hegseth Slams Pentagon Press as 'Pharisees'

(MENAFN) U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth escalated his long-running war with the media Thursday, unleashing a blistering attack on the Pentagon press corps, accusing journalists of churning out an "endless stream of garbage" in their reporting on the Iran conflict and invoking a charged biblical analogy to drive his point home.

Hegseth, a former Fox News anchor tapped by U.S. President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, drew a pointed parallel between the Pentagon media pool and the Pharisees — the Jewish faction depicted in the Bible as frequent adversaries of Jesus — in what marks yet another confrontation with the press corps well over a year into his tenure.

The remarks follow a wave of unflattering coverage directed at Hegseth over his "CSAR 25:17" reading at a Pentagon prayer service, which critics labelled a fabrication owing to its resemblance to a fictional passage from the Book of Ezekiel delivered by Samuel L. Jackson in the film Pulp Fiction.

"I just can't help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage you cannot resist peddling, despite the historic and important success of this effort and the success of our troops," Hegseth said at a Pentagon briefing Thursday. "Sometimes it's hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on."

Pressing further into religious allegory, he added: "The Pharisees – the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time – they were there to witness, to write everything down, to report. But … even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn't matter, they were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda."

Hegseth went on to say reporters are "just like these Pharisees," contending that ideological antagonism toward President Trump "blinds" them to "the brilliance of our American warriors."

The broadside is far from the first. In March, Hegseth went after what he described as the "dishonest and anti-Trump press" for attempting "to downplay progress, amplify every cost and call into question every step." Days later, he accused journalists of spotlighting U.S. casualties — including six U.S. Army reservists killed in an Iranian strike on an operations center in Kuwait — specifically "to make the president look bad."

Thursday's attack arrives amid a broader and increasingly conspicuous trend within the Trump administration of framing the Iran war through an explicitly religious and biblical lens. Multiple U.S. military commanders have reportedly offered theological interpretations of the offensive against Iran, with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) disclosing that some officers described Trump as a harbinger of the Second Coming and cast the conflict as a "signal fire" for Armageddon. Trump himself added fuel to the controversy by sharing an AI-generated image depicting himself as a Christ-like figure in the act of healing — a post that drew swift and widespread condemnation online.

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