Hegseth Adviser’s Posts Raise Questions About Pentagon Role

Ryan Higgins, a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has continued posting inflammatory comments about immigrants, LGBTQ people and other subjects after joining the Pentagon, according to a review of his social-media posts and other material spanning roughly a decade. The reporting also describes Higgins as involved in Hegseth’s religious messaging and the development of a new Pentagon religious-affairs office, though sources differed on the extent of his influence. Among the posts documented in the review, Higgins referred to LGBTQ people as a “satanic cult” and described same-sex adoption as “two dudes buying babies.” He wrote that immigrants were “killing and raping our white women,” and made statements portraying Islam as hostile to those who do not comply with it. These are Higgins’s statements as quoted in the reviewed posts, not independently established descriptions of the groups he discussed. The review covered hundreds of posts, livestreams and archived blog entries. It found that many of Higgins’s most extreme comments predated his Pentagon appointment, but that he continued expressing similar views after joining the department. In a post made after...