Pete Hegseth Wants to Wage War—Against the Left
The defense nominee is targeting American liberals, not our foreign enemies.
AT HIS CONFIRMATION HEARING on Tuesday, defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth pledged to “restore the warrior ethos.” He told the Senate Armed Services Committee: “When President Trump chose me for this position, the primary charge he gave me was to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense.”
Hegseth does seem to be interested in waging war. But it’s not a war against foreign enemies. It’s a war against Trump’s domestic opponents.
Hegseth has been obsessed for years with defeating American liberals. In 2020, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he used the words “war,” “battle,” and “fight” seven times in eight minutes. Not once did he direct those words toward a foreign adversary. Instead, he applied them to the left. “We are in a culture war,” Hegseth told the crowd. He invoked the Crusades as a model for that war (the theme of his then-new book), and he hailed Trump as the “break-glass-in-case-of-war president,” since Trump would vanquish the forces of “socialism” in the United States.
As Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Hegseth has set a partisan tone from the outset. He met individually with Republican senators but declined or ignored all such requests from Democratic senators. At Tuesday’s hearing, Democratic Senator Gary Peters asked Hegseth why he had spurned these requests. Hegseth answered preposterously, “Schedules get full.”
The panel’s Republican chairman, Senator Roger Wicker, asked Hegseth about allegations from multiple witnesses that he had a serious alcohol problem and had abused women. Hegseth responded by blaming the left. He decried “story after story in the media—left-wing media”—and scoffed that the “left-wing media in America today, sadly, doesn’t care about the truth.”
Again and again, Hegseth attributed the military’s troubles to “critical race theory” and “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion programs). In his opening statement, he didn’t mention Ukraine, but he did complain about the woke pursuit of “equitable” outcomes. When Republican Senator Eric Schmitt asked Hegseth how he would shore up military recruiting, the nominee replied: “First and foremost, up front, you have to tear out DEI and CRT initiatives, root and branch.”
Hegseth claimed that in purging such programs, his goal was to cleanse the military of bias so it could focus on “merit.” But the hearing showed that in reality, he would replace left-wing bias with right-wing bias. Several female senators noted that just two months ago, Hegseth repeated his persistent assertion—which he has since renounced, unconvincingly—that women should be categorically excluded from combat. “I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” he said in a November interview.
In Tuesday’s hearing, Hegseth said the case against women in combat was objective, because women on average are less physically capable of meeting battlefield standards. But Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen pointed out that in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth warned that women, apart from any physical difficulties they might have, were “also more likely to be objectified by the enemy and their own nation” in war. His argument seems to be that even if a woman meets the necessary physical standards, she shouldn’t be in combat because the men around her wouldn’t treat her like a man.
At his confirmation hearing, while rejecting any favorable treatment or “affirmative action” for racial minorities, Hegseth offered special accommodations for the GOP’s favorite marginalized group: vaccine refusers. He vowed to reinstate every service member who was discharged for defying military orders to get a COVID shot. In addition, he pledged, “They will receive an apology, back pay, and rank that they lost, because they were forced out due to an experimental vaccine.”
The “experimental” claim is false: The vaccines got full FDA approval before the armed forces mandated them. And vaccinations are a standard military requirement to ensure readiness and protect fellow service members. So when Hegseth demands an apology and back pay for vaccine refusers, he’s not promoting good order and discipline. He’s coddling a preferred minority.
When Hegseth says the military’s job is to prepare for wars and win them, he’s right. But if he takes over as defense secretary, he won’t cleanse the armed forces of soft-headed cultural obsessions. He’ll just replace the left’s obsessions with the right’s.