Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s typical culture war-laden, right-wing manosphere-infused sophomoric rhetoric was on full display Wednesday during his disturbing State of the Force address to midlevel enlisted service members and military officers assembled at Quantico.
Exactly a year ago Hegseth had used Quantico as a bully pulpit to ridicule and deride almost the entire cadre of then-serving generals and admirals — calling them fat; extolling a hypermasculine “warrior culture” seemingly ripped from the historic Christian Crusades that included a “war on woke”; excoriating past efforts at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion within the ranks; and goading senior officers who didn’t agree with his attacks on meritocracy or his campaign to erode the military’s apolitical nature to resign.
Such rhetoric should be taken seriously. Hegseth has been busy turning such rhetoric into reality, reversing decades’ worth of professionalism and efficacy gains in the armed forces, degrading national security in the process. Further, Hegseth exercises huge influence within the Trump administration — he reportedly counseled President Donald Trump to attack Iran — and has been floated as Trump’s heir apparent to the White House. His words cannot be ignored.
Now, a year after his initial Quantico address and numerous Hegseth-led assaults on the U.S. military — including a purge of 10% of senior officers (he’s now promised 20%); the subversion of merit-based senior leader promotion processes along gender, racial and ideological lines; the expulsion of thousands of experienced transgender members with critical skill sets; a suppression campaign against non-MAGA-aligned service member speech; and far more — it wasn’t much of a surprise when Hegseth double-downed Wednesday on his ideological warfare.
Hegseth has been busy turning such rhetoric into reality, reversing decades’ worth of professionalism.
While unsurprising, it’s clear that Hegseth’s statements cannot be trivialized as simply juvenile rhetoric. Instead, he is using long-recognized authoritarian propaganda techniques to gain control over a group. And there are many signs it is working. These tactics include attacks against the independent press, which were liberally sprinkled throughout Hegseth’s speech. He even accused the media of treason and of revealing troop positions without any evidence, reinforcing an “us against them” mentality between the military and the press, and with no hint of deserved irony, given his revelation to a reporter of classified military operations on a Signal chat last year.
Other authoritarian plays in his State of the Force address included his merger of nationalism with his specific brand of Christianity. In Wednesday’s speech, he quoted the Bible, called children “precious souls made in the image and likeness of God” and said that “America’s military must understand the difference” between God and evil. Hegseth employed significant “purification rhetoric” with his many statements lambasting the old “woke” culture to be replaced with the new “warrior” one. He also tried to militarize political identity while excluding disfavored groups: “We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
In addition to what Hegseth said and how he said it — in the context of what he’s done since January 2025 — what was surprising and frankly extraordinary was what Hegseth, at the helm of a Pentagon at war (which has refused to give press briefings on the war since May) failed to say Wednesday: He did not mention, even once, the 19 (or more) dead service members who made the ultimate sacrifice to our nation during the ongoing war against Iran. Nor did Hegseth acknowledge the over 850 service members wounded in this same war so far, troops who will bear battle scars for the rest of their lives. (Less surprising perhaps, but he also did not mention the over 120 little Iranian girls the U.S. military killed while under his command with a Tomahawk missile strike at the onset of the war due to reckless reliance on outdated intelligence, nor the moral injury such a crime caused to service members carrying out the strikes).
Hegseth likely didn’t mention the inconvenient truths of American deaths and injury because some were likely due to his own failures to ensure adequate force protection for U.S. troops who were clearly vulnerable to Iranian drones and missiles in places like Kuwait and Jordan, prior to his and Trump’s rush into their war of choice.
Hegseth’s failure to recognize the American troops killed and wounded in the Iran war on his watch speaks volumes.
And despite his statutory responsibility to take care of the troops, “accountability” is a word Hegseth likes to throw around but doesn’t appear to understand at all, and he certainly doesn’t apply it to himself. Hegseth claimed in his speech that his now 20% purge of senior military leaders — a deeply biased witch hunt — was about “accountability.” But expulsion of the most senior and experienced military leaders remains an integral part of Hegseth’s ideological campaign to remake the military into a Praetorian guard — a nondemocratic, nonpluralistic, nonmerit-based, nonsecular and unrepresentative of the American people military force that answers to MAGA leaders only.
Most importantly, Hegseth’s failure to recognize the American troops killed and wounded in the Iran war on his watch speaks volumes. It implies, most directly to those military members in attendance and to the total force they represent, that Hegseth doesn’t actually care about them or their sacrifices.
Instead, Hegseth trumpeted repeatedly what he actually does care about: dangerous culture war antics that play to his far-right base. Ominously, Hegseth cares about not just politicizing the military in clear departure from its nonpartisan, apolitical constitutional role in our democracy. Yesterday, he communicated his priority of efforts to ensure that the military is not just MAGA-leaning, but is a MAGA-looking, MAGA-sounding, MAGA-believing and MAGA-supporting Christian praetorian guard.
In his own words: “[T]he ideological clowns are out. The patriotic Cowboys are in.” Given his tendency to engage in “accusations in the mirror” — a propaganda technique in which someone falsely accuses their opponent of one’s own planned or ongoing misconduct — the real ideological clown, and a dangerous one at that, is Hegseth.
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