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‘It takes one to know one’: Stephen King just said the quiet part out loud about Pete Hegseth

Spot it you got it.

Horror legend Stephen King has been very open about his partying days. He’s a known alcoholic and has written books about the horrors of the disease (notably The Shining). He used that particular insight to say something about Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s troubled pick for the Pentagon leadership role: spot it you got it. Meaning King can suss out an alcoholic when he sees one.

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King, who recently left X after calling it “too toxic,” took a scalpel to the ongoing confirmation kerfuffle going on around Hegseth on Bluesky. There are the assault allegations, of course, but there’s one thing that’s weirdly taken a lot of the real estate of that conversation: Hegseth’s drinking.

“It takes one to know one: Pete Hegseth is an alcoholic,” King said on the platform. You can’t really get more direct than that. The A word is one that Hegseth seems to strategically try to avoid. It has a bad connotation for someone looking to run the military industrial complex.

A simple Google search will reveal that the press is trying to also avoid the word, perhaps for fear of retaliation or perhaps because they don’t want to put words in his mouth. The Daily Beast called the issue “alcohol troubles.” The Washington Post called it a “history with alcohol.”

What really seemed to push the issue to the forefront was an article in The New Yorker from about a week ago called “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History.” That publication refrained from using the word alcohol altogether in the headline.

In an interview with Meet The Press over at NBC, Trump was forced to comment on the issue. “It looks like Pete is doing well now,” he said in an interview that will air on Dec. 8.”I mean, people were a little bit concerned.”

Hegseth used to work at Fox News, and NBC News spoke with several of his former colleagues over there about his drinking. Some of those people said they smelled alcohol on him before he went live on the air. They also said he would talk about being hungover a lot. Sometimes he would miss important events.

“Everyone would be talking about it behind the scenes before he went on the air,” one of the former Fox employees said. The New Yorker article highlighted Hegseth’s behavior at two of his previous jobs before he came to Fox News. They also said he was “such a charming guy” but he acted like rules “didn’t apply to him.”

“A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity — to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events,” the magazine said.

Well, that certainly sounds like an alcoholic, that’s for sure. Hegseth has been in closed door meetings all week to try and staunch the bleeding, and it actually seems to be working. Speaker Mike Johnson recently said he was “optimistic” about Hegseth’s chances and that “We’ve all made mistakes in our lives, but we believe in redemption.” So far, only King has been brazen enough to call it like he sees it.




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Image of Jon Silman
Jon Silman
Jon Silman was hard-nosed newspaper reporter and now he is a soft-nosed freelance writer for WGTC.