By Dan Brown

Ye shall know them by the pop culture they appropriate.

There’s no better example than a troll post this week from U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

It shows a beloved Canadian cartoon icon, Franklin the Turtle, targeting narco terrorists with a rocket launcher from a helicopter overhead.

The image was the former Fox News host’s way of mocking critics who have slammed U.S. Navy drone attacks on vessels coming from Venezuela.

The difference, of course, is that there’s no evidence the real boats being bombed are manned by armed terrorists running drugs. If there was evidence, Hegseth would be posting that instead of a smiling, bloodthirsty Franklin.

Being a huge pop-culture fan, you might think it upsets me when politicians mess with icons like Franklin the Turtle, but I have come around to a new way of thinking.

I think it’s great, because it tells us exactly who they are. It puts a human face on government.

If U.S. voters and folks around the world didn’t know anything about Hegseth before this, they now have all the information they need to make an assessment of his character.

Commenters have been having a field day, with some telling Hegseth that Franklin is committing war crimes, which underlines the risk political leaders take when they dive into pop-culture waters. 

Oh, and Franklin’s publisher isn’t happy that their intellectual property has been co-opted, either.

For me, it calls to mind a forgotten fact from the late 1990s when the Vatican released a list of movies it invited the faithful to check out. Strangely, 2001: A Space Odyssey was on there, which is still a puzzler to me.

Why would the Vatican endorse a film in which an alien monolith provides the evolutionary spark that helps dumbass apes transform into humans? Why would it endorse a film with evolution at all? Doesn’t that fly in the face of the Christian creation story?

I still don’t get it. 

But just as Hegseth’s use of Franklin the Turtle inadvertently tells me a lot about him, so did the Pope’s movie picks tell me something about the strangeness of the Vatican bureaucracy.

One of the earliest examples in my life of politics and pop culture colliding was former vice-president Dan Quayle speaking out in 1992 against Murphy Brown for choosing to have a baby out of wedlock. 

Knowing Quayle was attacking a fictional character from a sitcom for an immoral life choice provided us with a fascinating glimpse into the Republican’s mind, confirming everything Quayle’s critics had been saying about him being an airhead. Did he know Murphy Brown is really a role played by Candace Bergen, not an actual broadcaster? 

(Quayle’s boss, George H.W. Bush, also slammed The Simpsons, saying the proper TV family to serve as role models should be the Waltons, not Homer and his brood. I am not even kidding, this actually happened.)

I guess Franklin the Turtle firing a bazooka at bad guys is what we should expect more of, considering how the man who picked Hegseth to run the Pentagon is best-known as a former reality-show host

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.