I don't know how people and especially all the veterans
in our country are not just in an uproar??
From the article: "this story is mostly a reminder
that the U.S. is under siege from a fascist movement
led by men who are trying to conceal their mediocrity.
Hegseth has waged all-out war on any evidence that
people who aren't straight white Christian men can be
effective soldiers."
and
"Under the new rules, the Defense Department can hire
firms with "whites only" bathrooms on-premise."
"Banning "Enola Gay": Pete Hegseth's DEI paranoia knows
no limits
During his confirmation hearing, Defense Secretary Pete
Hegseth repeatedly insisted he is not a racist nor a
misogynist, but wants "a Pentagon laser focused on
warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and
readiness." Despite his bellicose Christianity,
however, Donald Trump's appointee had no problem
violating the biblical commandment against bearing
false witness. As soon as he was sworn in, Hegseth did
exactly the opposite of what was promised.
He and Trump have devalued merit, expunging experienced
and dedicated military leaders for no real reason other
than they are not white men. Hegseth demanded budget
cuts. He backed Trump's refusal to send older weapons
to Ukrainian fighting forces, allowing the U.S.
military to update its stockpile. He's gone along with
Trump's war on intelligence-gathering on Russia, which
puts American troops at higher risk. He's supported
Elon Musk's war on veterans, as well, which includes
firing them from federal jobs and slashing 80,000
employees from Veterans Affairs.
Instead, Hegseth's priority — the better word is
"obsession" — since taking office has been pushing the
racism, misogyny, and queerphobia he denied during his
confirmation hearing.
Under the guise of eliminating "DEI" (short for
"diversity, equity and inclusion," but used as a slur
word by the right), Hegseth has waged all-out war on
any evidence that people who aren't straight white
Christian men can be effective soldiers.
On top of purges of military leadership, Hegseth has
canceled all military observances of Martin Luther King
Jr. Day, Pride Month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance and
any other occasion acknowledging the contributions of
people who aren't straight white Christian men. He's
also been on a rampage against military bases that
dropped the names of Confederate leaders. Being pro-
slavery is enough to exonerate literal treachery in
Hegseth's view.
Last week offered a sobering reminder of how Hegseth's
bigotry blitz isn't just symbolic, but will harm real
people. The Defense Department reversed a 1965 policy
that bars defense contractors from using segregation at
their facilities. Under the new rules, the Defense
Department can hire firms with "whites only" bathrooms
on-premise. Such workplaces likely don't exist in 2025,
but with Hegseth's tacit encouragement, who knows how
bad things will get.
Another recent result of Hegseth's single-minded
bigotry is at least kind of funny. In a frenzy to ban
anything deemed "DEI," the Defense Department flagged
photos and articles featuring the Enola Gay for
deletion from all websites and social media posts. The
Enola Gay was the plane that dropped a nuclear bomb on
Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. The name was not a reference
to homosexuality, but was given to the B-29 bomber by
the pilot in honor of his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets.
The database of banned images and references also
includes a long list of any service members with the
common last name "Gay." It appears Hegseth embraces
Musk's view that so-called artificial "intelligence"
can replace human workers. In this case, it's for the
best, as no human being should waste their precious
work hours on Hegseth's dogmatic desire to wipe history
clean of all evidence that people who aren't exactly
like him are worthy members of society.
The story did result in some good jokes.
Enola Gay will henceforth be known as Enola Straight.
Fat Man and Little Boy are holding steady.
apnews.com/article/dei-...
But overall, this story is mostly a reminder that the
U.S. is under siege from a fascist movement led by men
who are trying to conceal their mediocrity.
While he tries to play the victim of "wokeness," it
appears that Hegseth's military career ended in
failure. He has complained that the Army "spit me out,"
an apparent reference to how he was pulled off certain
duties because his colleagues notified superiors that
he has tattoos that are considered white supremacist
symbols. No doubt it's personal for him, seeing so many
women, people of color, and LGBTQ people rack up honors
and promotions he didn't get during his many years of
service.
It's also ideological for him, however. As I've
documented at Salon, Hegseth belongs to a far-right
Christian church that teaches slavery was the pinnacle
of race relations in the U.S. and that women should not
work outside the home or even have the right to vote.
These can't be written off as "private" religious
views. The church is openly Christian nationalist,
which means the leaders advocate for using the
government to force their religious beliefs on the
nation — basically, theocracy. Hegseth himself has
declared a need for an "army" that could remake the
U.S. into the far-right Christian society they desire.
It's not hard to see, therefore, what's going on here:
Hegseth sees the U.S. military as a venue for his
Christian nationalist social experiment. He's trying to
remake the military into his fantasy of a country where
straight white Christian men hold all the power and
everyone else is marginalized, often to the point of
exploitation.
One of the biggest Defense Department hires illustrates
how deep Hegseth's extremism runs. As Anna Merlan at
Mother Jones reported, the new deputy press secretary
at the Pentagon is Kingsley Wilson, a 26-year-old who
endorses the neo-Nazi "Great Replacement" theory that
holds Jews are secretly trying to "replace" white
Christians with immigrants of color. She has called for
"zero immigration" and posts German neo-Nazi slogans.
She also, just to show the bizarre depths of her
fixations, endorses a horrifically anti-semitic
conspiracy theory, as Merlan writes:
At least twice, Wilson also repeated long-debunked lies
online about the lynching death of Leo Frank, a Jewish
man who was kidnapped from a Georgia prison and
murdered in 1915, claiming he was guilty of the murder
for which most modern historians agree he was wrongly
convicted.
Pretty much the only people who push these lies about
the Leo Frank case are neo-Nazis and the KKK. The
lynching of Frank was a precipitating moment for the
rise of the KKK in the early 20th century. People who
want to valorize the KKK have an interest in
perpetuating the myth that Frank's lynching was
justified. As professional grammarian Benjamin Dreyer
noted on Bluesky, "Amateurs don't dabble in the Leo
Frank case; that takes an exceedingly well practiced
professional anti-Semite."
But it's also an extension of a larger far-right effort
to rewrite history to romanticize white supremacy and
create a false story to justify Christian theocracy.
Hegseth is deep in that world, and not just because he
wants to recast Confederate generals as heroes instead
of villains. The leader of his church has published
quite a bit of misleading history, including two books
defending chattel slavery in the American South,
replete with false claims that slavery was a benevolent
institution that served enslaved people's best
interests.
It's hard to imagine Hegseth is really focused on
"warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and
readiness." Instead, his energies seem mainly aimed at
creating this fantasy world where straight white
Christian men are the only ones who matter, and
everyone else barely rates mention, unless they're
recast as villains in this MAGA delusion.
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