
The Left Loses its Mind Over Hegseth as SecDef
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There’s about to be a new sheriff in town.
As if the election last week weren’t traumatic enough for Democrats, they are now being triggered anew by President-elect Donald Trump’s outside-the-box choices for posts in his incoming administration, including the likes of Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, and perhaps especially Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth, 44, is a decorated veteran, bestselling author, and Fox News co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. Trump is backing him for Secretary of Defense, where Hegseth would oversee a budget of more than $800 billion, with about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard, Reserves, and civilian employees based worldwide.
“With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice — Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down,” Trump said in a statement. “Nobody fights harder for the Troops, and Pete will be a courageous and patriotic champion of our ‘Peace through Strength’ policy.”
Democrat politicos are going apoplectic over the unorthodox selection. Wednesday on CNN’s Newsroom, regular commentator Van Jones, for example, called Trump’s pick of Hegseth “very alarming,” since the military is fine just the way it is:
I think if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. There’s the fiction that there’s something wrong with America’s military. What problem are you trying to solve? We have the most lethal, respected, the most feared military in the history of the world. There’s not even a number two. So the idea that our military, there’s something wrong with it, our generals are terrible, this is fiction. So when you start trying to solve nonexistent problems with the best fighting force in the world, you actually create problems.
The U.S. military today is shot through with diversity hires and LGBTQ advocates at the highest levels of leadership, who assert that the greatest existential threats to America are “white rage” and “climate change.” They have introduced DEI initiatives to try to instill racial division among the troops. They have sought to push conservatives – the biggest supporters of the military and the Constitution – out of service altogether. So of course Van Jones doesn’t think that a military shaped by progressive ideology needs fixing. But American patriots like Trump and Hegseth know better.
Jones went on to say disingenuously that there’s no “data or evidence that shows that having women involved in the military has made the military worse.” Women in the military isn’t the issue, and Jones knows it; the issue for conservatives is women on the front lines, in combat positions. Hegseth is firmly opposed to that – “Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat, that means casualties are worse,” he said on The Shawn Ryan Show podcast. But the Left can’t admit it’s a problem because they can’t acknowledge there are differences between men and women. If they do, their entire gender-ideology house of cards will collapse.