Pete Hegseth gathered the generals this morning. Not just a few generals, mind you, but all the generals.
From as far away as South Korea and Europe, members of every faction of the military were gathered at Quantico, Virginia so that War Daddy Hegseth could remind them it’s no longer called the Department of Defense (because what kind of beta cuck defends themselves?!) and that woke, politically correct, “climate change distraction” warmongering is over and clean-shaven, ideologically pure, “highest male standard” warmongering is in.
Welcome to the War Department, please enjoy your complimentary beard shave!
Like everyone else residing in America, I breathed a sigh of relief after watching the event. Gone are the days of limp-wristed, pronoun-loving, latte-sipping colonialism enacted under the trans flag with a vegan-forward ethos! Under the Department of WAR, there will be manly men doing manly things again, for AMERICA.
A spoonful of nationalism to help the unreleased Epstein files go down.
The speech was heavy on fitness. Fat generals are out; lean, mean, war machines are in. Beards are banned, grooming standards are back. Gender-neutral uniforms are required, except does that make it sound a bit leftie again?! Never mind. As I was saying: WAR.
Of course, the war Hegseth and Donald Trump like more than any other is the culture war. We know this partially because Trump has never actually been to a war (bone spurs are a serious problem, guys) and partially because they just demanded almost the entire US military abandon their posts to attend a glorified pep rally where the first agenda item was optics. Imagine telling hundreds of generals to fly in from around the world so you can stand on stage and say you’re done with style over substance, without a hint of irony.
This is very much the Trump vibe: announce a showy cultural pivot, drape it in marble rhetoric about “decades of decay,” then promptly forget to govern. You may not be able to afford meat, but rest assured, your nation’s armed forces will never again suffer the indignity of an overweight colonel.
“I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships again,” the president said offhandedly, during an unfocused speech in which he referred to “admirals” then seemed to correct himself that that’s “an old term,” and borrowed from his equally unfocused recent UN speech by talking around tariffs and “countries taking advantage of us for too long”. Some people travelled thousands of miles to hear that. Nobody clapped.
And while we’re now all supposed to debate whether anonymous complaints about hazing are “woke” or not, real people are trying to figure out how to pay rent. The Trump administration is once again mainlining silly ideological BS into the bloodstream while mass shootings carry on in the background.
If you’re going to summon every general in the land to clap along to your “no more political correctness” jam session, you could at least slip us the unredacted paperwork on who exactly was on which Epstein flight. If the War Department wants to be useful, maybe start there.
But no: we get grandstanding about beards and “warrior ethos,” because we’re living in the worst timeline. The pageantry is the point.
Just a couple weeks after he left the country to ride around in a golden carriage with the British royals, Trump gets to play Commander-in-Cosplay, Hegseth gets to pretend he’s rebooting 300, and the rest of us get to watch the slow transformation of US governance into one long, deeply unfunny improv show.
It’s pointless, it’s embarrassing, and it messed up everyone else’s day. But hey, two ageing, powerful men had fun. And isn’t it all so worth it when you see their eyes light up?
