Nagging Democrats Shriek At Pete Hegseth During Confirmation Hearing

It now appears to be all but certain that Pete Hegseth will be confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense. Republican leaders in the Senate have said as much. And it’s not hard to see why that’s the case. After weeks of telling us that Hegseth is unqualified for the job, Democrats spent several hours trying — and utterly failing —  to land a single meaningful blow against his nomination.

Instead, Hegseth came across as a Christian who’s very aware of his own past personal failings, but he was also able to put those failings in context. Under the leadership of former Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin, the Pentagon carried out political purges in the military. It oversaw a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. It terminated thousands of soldiers who didn’t want to take the experimental COVID shot. Those are colossal failings that no one in the Pentagon has ever atoned for. Pete Hegseth is not a perfect man. Who is? But he is a saint compared to the people who ran the old regime. And after yesterday’s hearing, no reasonable person can deny that.

Throughout the hearing, Democrats discredited themselves, one after another, with botched gotcha-moments and non-sequiturs. And the optics could not have been worse, as women kept screaming at Hegseth, all while trying to make the argument that women are just as capable of serving in combat roles as men. If there was a way to weaponize nagging so that you could literally nag your enemies to death, they may have a point. These women could create a weapon of mass nagging destruction and kill thousands of enemy combatants at once, if that was possible.

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Before we get into that particular part of the hearing, it’s important to set the stage with some of the many blunders I’m referring to.

Here for example is Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, attempting to make the point that Hegseth has no business running the Defense Department, because he has never, “driven innovation” in any organization in his life. Here’s how that went:

Obviously, he asked a question he didn’t know the answer to. That’s the first mistake. He then made it clear that didn’t really care about the answer to his question, either. And total humiliation was the result.

Even aside from that, what’s extraordinary about his question is that Lloyd Austin had exactly the kind of experience that Gary Peters is talking about. Austin was in charge of the war effort in both Iraq and Afghanistan for many years. According to Democrats in Congress, that made Austin qualified to be Secretary of Defense — even though both of those wars ended in complete disaster. This is what “box-checking” looks like. These people cannot comprehend the idea of hiring someone who hasn’t made money in the defense industry, and who hasn’t overseen two failed wars. They see that as a mark against Hegseth, instead of the primary reason to confirm him.

Not to be outdone, there was Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, coming in hot with his own takedown. Watch:

The implication is that Pete Hegseth is a terrible guy because he’s used the word “jagoff” in the past. I think that Hegseth throwing around insults like that does open him up to the charge of being a Boomer. I’m not sure it says anything more than that, however. Then, when Hegseth answers the question, Jack Reed looks stunned. One might even say he looked like a jagoff.

I do want to highlight one moment of substantive discussion, however, to the extent anything in this hearing could be described as “substantive.” Several senators took turns berating Hegseth over his stance on women in the military. In particular, Hegseth says he’s generally fine with women in combat roles, but at a minimum, he wants the fitness standards to be equal across genders. Effectively, as I’ll explain in a moment, that actually means he doesn’t want women to serve in combat roles. You aren’t going to say it as directly as that in a hearing like this, because the whole point is that you need to be confirmed. If Hegseth had just come out and said plainly that he doesn’t want any women in combat, that would have given squishy Republicans all the excuse they need to not confirm him. So instead he focused on the fitness requirements, which was strategically smart.

In response to his position on fitness requirements, various senators adopted the bizarre (and clearly false) position that the standards between men and women in the military are already the same. Watch:

Before we look at Hegseth’s response to this line of question, it’s important to point out that nothing Kirsten Gillibrand just said is true. The standards of physical fitness, across every branch of the armed forces, are much lower for women than they are for men.

Let’s start with the fitness requirements at the Navy.

Navy Physical Readiness Program. Guide 5. Physical Readiness Test (PRT). January 2023.

As you can see, their physical readiness test consists of some variation of push-ups, forearm planks, a 1.5 mile run and a 500-yard swim. So let’s take the run as an example — which by the way, the Navy refers to as a “Run/walk” section, because they expect applicants won’t be able to run the full distance.

For men aged 17 to 19, a “satisfactory” time on the 1.5 mile run is 12 minutes and 15 seconds. For women in the same age group, a “satisfactory time” is 14 minutes and 45 seconds. So they get a full 2 minutes and 30 second extra to complete this run. And by the way, you can technically get even worse times than this, and still pass — because there’s a whole “probationary” level below “satisfactory.”

For push-ups, the difference is even more stark. Men aged 17 to 19 have to hit 46 pushups for a “satisfactory” rank. Women only need to hit 20. Meanwhile, the minimum “outstanding” score for men is 86 pushups, while it’s only 47 pushups for women.

If you go to the Army’s website, you’ll find similar numbers across their physical fitness test.

Courtesy U.S. Army. https://www.army.mil/acft/

This is the “Sprint, drag, carry” test, for example. It’s a test that obviously has a lot of relevance to people who want to serve in the Army, in case they need to carry a wounded soldier — and not blame them for being wounded, as they do in the Los Angeles Fire Department. As you can see, men get max points if they finish the test in one minute, 29 seconds. Women get max points if they finish it in one minute, 55 seconds. So they get an additional 26 seconds to “sprint, drag and carry” someone.

Just to underscore the real-world consequences of this kind of gender-based testing, here’s a post from someone named Nathan Spearing:

In 2005, I was 22 and had one of the top PT scores in my platoon in Ranger Battalion. One night, one of my mates was shot and completely immobilized. I worked with a small group of men to get him to the casualty evacuation point, while our platoon continued the raid. Dragging him through the streets of Iraq that night I felt like I’d never worked out in my life. I was one of the most physically fit men in an elite light infantry unit and this combat related task took me well beyond my physical capacities. Women shouldn’t do these jobs ever. They can’t without endangering the mission and the men around them.

The military appears to be fine with that. The Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard and even the Space Force have similar arrangements. Here for example is the Coast Guard’s breakdown of fitness standards, explicitly aligned with men on top, and women on the bottom:

Courtesy: U.S. Coast Guard physical fitness standards.

As you can see, men need to do 29 push-ups if they’re under 30 years old. Women only need to do 15. Meanwhile, over in the Marines, men need to do three pull-ups or 34 push-ups in 2 minutes, while women only have to do 1 pull-up or 15 push-ups in the same time period.

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I could go on, but you get the point. There is nothing “gender-neutral” about the fitness standards for any branch of the armed services. This is not up for debate. It can’t be disputed. It is simply a fact that standards are lowered for women, and that’s been the case for decades now. It’s also a fact that the standards for men have also been lowered. There has been an effort to get more women into the military, and also less fit men. These two goals are obviously related to each other. In truth, 46 pushups is not satisfactory for a grown man who wants to join the military. For the Coast Guard the number is 29, which is downright pathetic. We should expect a lot more of the people who are tasked with defending this country from its enemies.

But what Gillibrand was saying is that, at the urging of Congress, certain specialties — like the infantry — have adopted their own, independent “gender-neutral standards” on top of the basic requirements. But that hasn’t been going well, either.

As the Army Times reported in 2022:

The Army is moving forward with its long-awaited Army Combat Fitness Test this year, but the service has officially dropped the test’s attempt to set a gender- and age-neutral physical fitness standard … The leg tuck is no longer an event. … A 2.5-mile walk has been added as an alternate aerobic event for troops whose medical profiles prevent them from running. … A total of 48% of active duty enlisted women and 28% of active duty female officers could not pass the test.

In other words, they tried to make the test “gender-neutral,” and women kept failing it. So they responded by gutting the test, and making it a lot easier. And after all that, it’s still not “gender-neutral.”

In his answer to Kirsten Gillibrand, Pete Hegseth attempted to make these points. He also outlined his own first-hand observation of lowered standards in the military. And Kirsten Gillibrand responded by shrieking at him:

This was the theme of the hearing: Democrats demand an answer, they get one they don’t like, so they start screaming.

The truth, obviously, is that if men and women were held to the same standard in the military, there wouldn’t be any women in the military. Pete Hegseth may not want to say that out loud at a confirmation hearing — which makes sense — but it’s the truth. Including women in the military necessitates, by definition, lowering the standard. That’s why I say we should raise the standard for everyone, make it the same for everyone, and then let the chips fall where they may. The inevitable result is that they’ll fall on an all-male fighting force, which is how it should be.

Of course, even aside from the fact that women can’t do the job as well, they shouldn’t be serving in combat regardless. A functional society does not send women out to die on the battlefield. They are not equipped for it, physically or psychologically. But our government has been denying this basic fact for years.

A decade ago, when the defense secretary at the time opened up all combat roles to women, he said, “They’ll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat.” He made that seem like it was a sign of great progress. But it’s a sign of decay, not progress. It’s also a sign that we’re going to lose the next major war we’re a part of, unless we turn back from this madness. And after yesterday’s confirmation hearing, finally, it seems like we’ll have a defense secretary who understands that.