Hegseth To Top Military Brass: No More Dudes In Dresses

The Secretary of War and the President of the United States spoke before hundreds of top U.S. military leaders on Tuesday.

This event had been touted for a few days in advance. The idea was to have all the top U.S. military brass gather at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. 

There was a lot of speculation about the meeting. Was it going to be an announcement about Ukraine? Or China? Or was it going to be about Venezuela?

It turns out, it was going to be a speech from Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, and a speech from the President of the United States, about recalibrating our military approach, particularly internally.

Pete Hegseth has spoken about this a lot over the past few years. I recorded an episode of the Sunday Special with Pete Hegseth about a year ago. He had a new book out, “The War on Warriors,” in which he wrote about wokeness in the military, lowered standards in the military, and the fact that more militaries around the world were not fearing us as much because we had implemented all of these left-wing ideologies within the military. This has legitimately been a big bugaboo of Hegseth’s for years.

Well, now he has the opportunity to change all of that because, of course, he sits atop the Department of War.

The event, according to The Washington Post, was organized by Hegseth’s team at the Pentagon. He summoned generals and admirals from command posts throughout the world to Virginia.

General Dan Caine, Trump’s hand-selected Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told attendees in his opening comments that the event was an unprecedented opportunity, and an honor for assembled senior officers and their top enlisted advisers to hear directly from the military civilian leadership. 

Hegseth was going after wokeness in the military again, and he railed against what he called “Fat dudes and men in dresses.”

So, optically, yes, I understand the Left being very, very upset about it. But it happens to be something that the American people agree with, along with the people who enlist in our military. Journalists around the nation are very, very upset about what Pete Hegseth did yesterday because they believe the military should be a place for social engineering, as opposed to a place for warfighters.

Well, Secretary Hegseth was a grunt. He’s a person who served in the trenches, and on the front lines. And that means he is significantly more in touch with the feelings of people who actually serve in the military, than certainly the people in the world of journalism — and truthfully, more than many of these sorts of political generals who have spent the last 40 years rising in the ranks.

Which means that recalibrating along those lines is actually not a bad thing at all.

As Secretary Hegseth said yesterday:

Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad. And it’s not who we are. So, whether you’re an Airborne Ranger or a “Chairborne Ranger,” a brand new private, or a four star general, you need to meet the height and weight standards and pass the PT test.

This, apparently, was very upsetting to folks. 

He also went after what he called “Dudes in dresses,” which was a specific reference to the fact that under the Biden administration, there were legitimate videos of troops doing drag as an attempt to drive people into the military. I can’t think of anything that would drive the types of young men who want to join the military away from the military more than men in drag.

Honestly, that does not seem like a recruiting pitch for the U.S. military. And you can see it in the numbers. The Biden administration was having a very, very difficult time fulfilling its recruiting quotas. From literally the minute Pete Hegseth was announced as Secretary of Defense, those numbers began to rise.

Hegseth then said: 

This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics. No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris. As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that sh**.

People are apparently angry about this. And there’s also a fair bit of gaslighting going on here. 

So the way that this works is that when the Left takes over an institution, they skew that institution. And then, when somebody who is not on the Left takes over the institution and says, “We’re going to unskew it,” the Left then says, “How dare you do this? How dare you politicize?”

They do this with so many institutions in American life. For example, take higher education, a domain once designed to actually create better American citizens, people who are supposed to be in touch with their civilization. They took an institution that was supposed to be at least titularly nonpartisan and made it highly partisan in favor of the Left.

And then people get into power who are not on the Left. And they say, “Let’s shift it back. Let’s shift it back toward the center.” And the Left says, “How dare you touch our hallowed institutions? How dare you attempt to change the underlying politics of that institution?”

The same thing in the military. There is an attempt by the Left to hijack the military and use it for a wide variety of social engineering causes, ranging from climate change to DEI to gender identity.

And now, when the Right takes over and says, “Hey, we’re not going to do any of that stuff, we’re actually going to go back to the status quo where the military was about winning wars,” the Left responds, “How dare you? How dare you politicize? How dare you intervene? How dare you get involved in politics?” This is an exercise in gaslighting.

The Left is perfectly willing to gut these institutions and wear their faces around like a mask from “The Silence of the Lambs.” But the minute the Right says, “Let’s restore those institutions to what they were before,” the Left then claims politicization.

It’s nonsense.