Jon Stewart took aim at Kash Patel on the latest episode of The Daily Show, mocking the FBI Director for joining the Team USA men’s hockey team after their big Olympics win.
“This country is in such emotional turmoil right now,” Stewart said. “A feeling that we are one nation divided, under siege. That perhaps we have crossed a Rubicon of this great American experiment, and that we, slowly and inexorably, are sliding into the abyss of fallen and broken democracies. But then!”
Stewart recounted Team USA’s win at the Olympics over the weekend. The U.S. hockey team triumphed over Canada in Milan—an event that was attended by Patel. Stewart shared footage of the game’s final moments, cheering as he noted, “I know the powerful elites remain unaccountable, but he put that thing behind that other guy!”
He continued, “This country was sinking into a cesspool we can’t recover from, but the vulcanized rubber disk went past the lord of the net. It was so unifying. There is nothing that can take away from the joyous moment as all Americans celebrate this incredible—wait, what the fuck?”
Stewart then shared a photo of Patel wearing one of the team’s gold medals in the locker room. “Is that FBI Director Kash Patel?” Stewart inquired. “And why are they putting a medal around the neck of FBI Director Kash Patel? Is Kash Patel a Make-a-Wish man? Kid? Is that what this is? And I’m not trying to diminish his condition. Listen, there is currently no cure for crazy eyes.”
The host added that MAGA is “going crazy for the victory,” with one commentator saying the win offsets the current “estrogenic culture.”
“First of all, what a super weird year hockey is having,” Stewart responded. “In four months, to go from, ‘Nobody gives a shit about hockey’ to ‘Well, I like to watch them fuck’ to ‘Only hockey can save us from a dystopian estrogenic future.'”
Stewart explained that the right is also thrilled about being able to take shots at Canada. The host cut to a clip from Fox News, with reporters saying Canadians are “basically communists” and that “hockey is all that they had and we took that away.”
“What is with this sore winning?” Stewart said. “And by the way, don’t we have enough real enemies? Now we got to pretend like Canada’s way of life is incongruous to the west? ‘Yeah! Fuck those completely best neighbors our nation has ever had!’”
He added, “So there you have it folks. We have defeated our new enemy, Canada, on the ice and vanquished them to the penalty box of history. Now America can live in a golden era of peace and prosperity.”
Elsewhere in his monologue, Stewart discussed Donald Trump‘s threats against Iran and how the Supreme Court took a wrecking ball to Trump’s “wildly unpopular” tariff strategy.
“Wow. A court composed mostly of his own party’s appointees has struck down the constitutionality of Trump’s go-it-alone tariff regime,” Stewart said. “That’s bound to cause him some introspection.”
Stewart cut to a clip of Trump calling the Supreme Court a “disgrace to our nation” and suggesting the justices are an “embarrassment” to their families. “When a guy who had sex with a porn star right after his wife had given birth tells you you’re an embarrassment to your family, I think you have to take that seriously,” he said.
Pete Hegseth gestures after giving a State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Sept. 30, 2026 in Quantico, Va.
Pete Hegseth’s ‘Warfighter’ Crusade Isn’t About Killing
Pete Hegseth, to his credit, understands one truth about the world: the military’s job is to kill people.
Hegseth, the newly rebranded “Secretary of War,” is obsessed with showcasing clean-cut troops trained to do just that. He refers to it as “lethality,” a word that he used twice in his roughly hour-long State of the Force speech on Wednesday, which laid out his vision for this new, more-violent military: a force of fit, unified “warfighters,” unburdened by the bureaucracy and norms of the past.
“No more diversity quotas, no more gender pronouns, no more identity months,” Hegseth said, pacing back and forth on stage. “Only the warrior ethos.”
If that wasn’t enough, he doubled down moments later.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” Hegseth said, stumbling over his words slightly. “No fanny, no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.”
To do this, Hegseth thinks, the military needs to work out. He wants every soldier doing physical training every day. He leads group workouts at the Pentagon, hops in on PT, does pullups and pushups and flexes his muscles. This is all, broadly, fine for a Defense Secretary to do. Go ahead, engage with your troops. (Less normal, perhaps, is his obsession with monitoring troops’ testosterone levels.) But Hegseth’s CrossFit crusade isn’t really about killing.
By any objective measurement, the U.S. military is plenty good at killing. We have more bombs and more planes and more ships and better-trained and equipped troops than any country in the world. The “warrior ethos” Hegseth is so obsessed with is the relic of recruitment videos from the peak of the War on Terror, the years of bearded operators with ropy muscle covered in Kevlar fabric, who kicked in doors and sniped off heads and got their hands dirty. Those guys still exist, of course. They haven’t gone away. If they’re needed again, they will be there.
But combat doesn’t look like that anymore.
On the same day that Hegseth delivered his speech, the U.S. formally withdrew from Iraq, one of America’s last active presences in the wars of occupation that defined the military for the past two decades. War is different now. It is fought with drones and cruise missiles from the decks of ships in the Persian Gulf and dusty air-bases outside of the glittering megacities of America’s Middle Eastern oil merchants. Does every soldier involved in this need a perfect waist-to-shoulder ratio? Does it physically impede America’s interests abroad to have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies? Has the existence of trans servicemembers ever stopped the U.S. military from killing even a single person that it wanted to kill, anywhere in the world, at any time?
Hegseth, I think, would say yes. He has a personal chip on his shoulder. The “woke” elements of Army bureaucracy once removed him from service at Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo on his arm that reads “DEUS VULT,” a common rallying cry for a very particular kind of extremist Christian nationalism. But most rational observers, people who are clear-eyed about America’s unparalleled ability to Blow Shit Up, can recognize that all of these arguments are battles of cultural semantics that have basically nothing to do with the military’s ability to kill. With respect to “lethality,” the U.S. military is pretty much fine. If you doubt this, ask an Iraqi.
Hegseth’s relentless focus on violent language and imagery is largely a marketing tactic for what is a more holistic cultural and political shift. Hegseth does not want a military that is indicative of America’s cumbersome, bureaucratic state apparatus in the same way that Trump is relentlessly focused on cutting red tape and federal “waste.” There are certainly inefficiencies in the federal system, but much of that bureaucracy exists for precisely the reason that Hegseth and Trump want it gone: it is a check on unitary power. Hegseth wants a united, homogenous military of soldiers who share his cultural prejudices, who share his bloodthirsty ethos, and who share his religion. In the State of the Force speech and many other recent public appearances, Hegseth has quoted scripture and explicitly referenced his Christian faith, a tacit assumption that he expects the men and women in uniform below him to be Christian. He wants a force that, in his own words, does not buy into the “fake news” media’s “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, patently false claims of low troop morale or flat-out propaganda.”
A more malleable military is also a better business opportunity. The Trump administration has been terribly effective at streamlining the process by which they can redistribute money to the oligarchs they choose. The so-called Department of War is no different. In his speech, Hegseth announced an initiative called “Project Meridian,” a sort of tech incubator for military contractors that will be run by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and, bizarrely, Newt Gingrich, who Hegseth said would be joined by “hand-picked private sector leaders.”
“Their work will be focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes without any creative limitations or restrictions,” Hegseth said. “On any future battlefield, from under the earth to beyond the moon, our American warriors will be armed with absolute technological superiority because we will have the foresight to prepare today for tomorrow.”
That’s the window dressing. There’s truth there, of course: the military does have a lot of work to do to adapt to the new forms of warfare playing out in Ukraine. Battle has shifted. But what Project Meridian represents is a shift to a faster, less regulated version of the military industrial complex. There will be less oversight. The money will move where Trump and Hegseth want it to, delivered to the tech barons and traditional defense contractors who best curry favor with the administration. This is for the good of the soldier, regardless of what Hegseth says. It does not make us more deadly. It just makes a select few — some of whom aren’t even American — that much more rich.
After all, that’s the goal, right? A prosperous, united, Christian nation, led by titans of industry who bow only to a single leader who can reshape the world on a whim. No fatties, no weirdos, no radicals. No dissent, crucially. Dissent is traitorous. As soldiers, as civilians, even, all we should think about is how to kill. Hegseth and his hand-picked private sector will handle the rest.