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Last week, the Washington Post sparked a media kerfuffle when it reported that talk-show-host-turned-defense secretary Peter Hegseth had invited MAGA provocateur Jack Posobiec to “participate” in Hegseth’s first overseas trip and that this was “triggering alarm among US defense officials worried about the military being dragged into partisan warfare.”

This article and pieces in other outlets noted that Posobiec was a 2020 election denier and a promoter of conspiracy theories who had championed Pizzagate—the bonkers idea that Democrats were running a Satanic pedophile ring from the basement of a Washington, DC, eatery. They reminded readers that last year at a conservative conference, he had proclaimed, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

As it turned out, Posobiec, a podcaster and a senior editor at Human Events, an ultra-right publication, told Politico that he didn’t tag along with Hegseth. Instead, he accepted an invitation from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to travel with him as media to Ukraine for the secretary’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

All of this raises a troubling question: Why are Trump cabinet officials reaching out to a right-wing activist who has associated with white nationalists and who has pushed dangerous and debunked conspiracy theories (one Pizzagate believer showed up armed at the restaurant and fired an AR-15 rifle inside)? Moreover, last year, Posobiec published a book that praised fascist leaders who used violence to suppress their opponents and that demonized modern-day progressives as “unhumans,” claiming these diabolical people are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” to annihilate American civilization.