Hegseth Wrecks Trump-Hating Media

The legacy media have stonewalled letting President Trump have the win he deserves for his strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities. What President Trump did in Iran is one of the most historic wins of my lifetime.

Just to recap, Israel launched an overwhelming aerial assault on the Iranian facilities, nuclear and missile-based. They were going after ballistic missile development factories in Iran — their ballistic missile stockpiles, their missile launchers — as well as their nuclear facilities.

For nearly two weeks, Israel hammered the Iranians. But there was one facility in particular, Fordo, which was some 250-300 meters underground. And Israel did not have the ordnance capable of penetrating that facility. So President Trump authorized a B-2 strike using 30,000 pound bombs on Fordow, and in his words, “obliterated” the site.

The media won’t let that be the case, that President Trump used force to end the Iranian nuclear program and then declared the war over — and it was over.

It was, in fact, a historic win, and a win that we haven’t seen in American foreign policy in my lifetime: One strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities, a complete reshuffling of the deck in the Middle East with Israel as a regional powerhouse and Iran a supplicant, and no continuous war between Israel and Iran, no hot war continuing.

With no American casualties, by the way.

An amazing accomplishment.

But the media just won’t let President Trump have it. They won’t. They keep claiming over and over and over that, actually, maybe Fordo wasn’t destroyed. In fact, Fordo is fine. Maybe the Israeli-American effort was completely for naught, they claim.

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They have no basis upon which to say this, other than the word of Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been tweeting that everything is hunky dory from his bunker, presumably in Tehran, claiming with astonishing chutzpah:

With all that commotion and all those claims, the Zionist regime was practically knocked out and crushed under the blows of the Islamic Republic.

You have to be high on drugs to believe this. He was literally hiding in a bunker for the entirety of the war. His regime was so weak that the Israeli Air Force was flying continuous sorties unhindered over Iranian airspace, with zero casualties on the IAF side, zero, for two weeks.

And yet he says that, in reality, the “Zionist regime,” Israel, was practically knocked out and crushed:

My congratulations on our dear Iran’s victory over the US regime. The US regime entered the war directly because it felt that if it didn’t, the Zionist regime would be completely destroyed. It entered the war in an effort to save that regime but achieved nothing.

The Baghdad Bob aspect in the Middle East is always absurd to Westerners. Ayatollah Khomeini trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, at least in terms of public perception, does not mean that he was not, in fact, hammered or that the nuclear program is intact.

But Khamenei tweeted out:

The Islamic Republic delivered a heavy slap to the US’s face. It attacked and inflicted damage on the Al-Udeid Air Base, which is one of the key US bases in the region.

Nope. Actually, he called and he whined and begged the Qataris and the Americans to allow him to send a few missiles at the base, none of which actually hit.

Why am I telling you what Khamenei is saying? Because you’re hearing it echoed by the media. The New York Times and CNN reported that there was a Defense Intelligence Agency estimate that Fordo had not been knocked out, not been obliterated, not even been severely damaged.

It turned out that that was a low-confidence assessment by one of 18 intelligence agencies under the DIA. It didn’t matter. The media ran with it anyway. This became the top story in the media.

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How do we know that it’s stupid? According to the UN nuclear watchdog head, the director general of the IAEA, there was “no escaping significant physical damage after the U.S. strike on the Iranian facility.” Barak Ravid of Axios, a front man for Left-wing and isolationist agitprop coming out from various leak-driven parts of various administrations, tweeted, “I told Jake Tapper that a senior Israeli intelligence official told me that other than the word ‘obliterated’ the reality regarding the results of the attack on Iran is much closer to where Trump says it is than to where the initial DIA report said it was.”

All of this came to a head yesterday when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did a press conference. He crushed the fake news that’s been targeting President Trump, declaring:

Because you cheer against Trump so hard — it’s like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad — you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope maybe they weren’t effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration represented them isn’t true. So let’s take half-truths, spun information, leaked information, and then spin it. Spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful.

This was an historically successful attack. We should celebrate it as Americans, and it gives us a chance to have peace, a chance to have a deal and an opportunity to prevent a nuclear Iran, which is something President Trump talked about for 20 years.

He was correct.

Hegseth wasn’t done. He called on Jennifer Griffin of Fox News, who’d been one of the people who reported this particular DIA assessment.

Griffin: Do you have certainty that all the highly enriched uranium was inside the Fordo mountain, or some of it, because there were satellite photos that showed more than a dozen trucks there two days in advance. Are you certain none of that highly enriched uranium was moved?

Hegseth: Of course, we’re watching every single aspect. But, Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says.

Griffin: I was reporting about the ventilation shafts on Saturday night. And in fact, I was the first to describe the B-2 bombers, the refueling, the entire mission with great accuracy. So I take issue with that.

Hegseth: I appreciate you acknowledging that this was the most successful mission, based on operational security, that this department has done since you’ve been here. I appreciate that. So, we’re looking at all aspects of intelligence and making sure we have a sense of what was what.

Hegseth got feisty with the media, and a lot of it was deserved. Some of the questions he was asked were absolutely ridiculous. He was asked by a reporter about the fact that he had suggested that it was “brave boys” who flew the plane when one of the people in the plane was a woman, and here was his response:

So when I say something like our boys and bombers, see, this is the kind of thing the press does, right? Of course. The chairman mentioned a female bomber pilot. That’s fantastic. She’s fantastic. She’s a hero. I want more female bomber pilots. I hope the men and women of our country sign up to do such brave and audacious things.

But when you spin it as, because I say “our boys,” — and bombers is a common phrase — I’ll keep saying things like that, whether they’re men or women. Very proud of that female pilot. Just like I’m very proud of those male pilots. And I don’t care if it’s a male or a female in that cockpit, and the American people don’t care. But it’s the obsession with race and gender in this department that’s changed priorities. And we don’t do that anymore. We don’t play your little games.

You could see how deeply, deeply annoyed Hegseth was along with the entire administration, having to explain that when you drop 12 bunker-busters on an Iranian nuclear site and destroy their nuclear facilities — or at the very least render them completely inoperable — and then the media lie about it and seek any speck of information to discredit that — it is deeply annoying.

And it should be deeply annoying. The media refuse to give President Trump the win he deeply deserves.

Simply put, they are trash.