A year ago this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned the military’s top commanders — roughly 800 generals and admirals — who were spread around the world to come to Virginia to listen to him give a bizarre, self-indulgent and wildly unnecessary pep rally speech. By all accounts, the audience was unimpressed.

On Wednesday afternoon, the former Fox News host whom Senate Republicans confirmed to lead the Pentagon gave it another try, though at times Hegseth appeared to be doing an imitation of Colin Jost imitating him on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

“The ideological clowns are out,” the defense secretary said, sounding very much like an ideological clown. “The patriotic cowboys are in — with testosterone testing on top.”

He proceeded to condemn the free press, American higher education, overweight people and transgender people, as well as “beardos,” “weirdos,” “wimps” and “radicals.” For good measure, the prescreened attendees at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia were also rewarded with a bound collection of Hegseth’s speeches, packaged as a “field manual.”

But there was one unexpected element of Hegseth’s presentation that stood out for me. From MS NOW’s live coverage:

Hegseth announced that tech billionaire and former Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk, alongside former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Oculus headsets founder Palmer Luckey, will co-lead an effort called Project Meridian to “study the future of warfare.”

“Those three great Americans are going to be joined by a team of senior leaders, handpicked private sector leaders and subject matter experts from across our nation’s unmatched innovation, academic and policy ecosystems,” Hegseth said.

The specific purpose of Project Meridian is a little unclear, and the Pentagon’s announcement about the initiative was filled with tiresome corporate phrasing — these guys are apparently going to be “facilitating” a “proactive vision” by “leveraging” experts— but this apparently has something to do with identifying “the domains” that the U.S. armed forces “must conquer.”

Hegseth picked a curious trio for the endeavor.

Luckey, who arguably has the lowest profile of the bunch, is a tech entrepreneur, generous Republican donor and Donald Trump enthusiast. Gingrich, meanwhile, is a former House speaker whose own GOP members drove him from Capitol Hill more than a quarter of a century ago.

Collectively, they have zero days of military experience, and Gingrich famously received a great many deferments while avoiding military service during the war in Vietnam.

And then, of course, there’s Musk, a billionaire who also never served in the military, whose overt racism and antisemitism should make him politically radioactive. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie posited in a July column:

Why does Musk get a pass? Why do politicians, journalists and commentators treat his far-right racist radicalism as a sideshow rather than the core of his political, ideological and industrial project, seen in everything from his deep support for Donald Trump in the United States and Restore Britain in Britain to his decision to construct a massive pollution-generating data center in predominantly Black Memphis?

Musk spends a large part of his free time fomenting violence and spreading the same hateful ideology that motivated some of the deadliest shootings and attacks ever to happen on American soil. It is that fact, and not the cars he builds or the rockets he launches, that ought to define his place in public life.

In the months that followed, Musk began trying to buy the midterms for Republicans, and then Hegseth invited him to help lead “Project Meridian.”

It is difficult to be optimistic about the initiative’s future.

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From MS Now.