Radical narco Islamic-feminist communism
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) March 5, 2026 at 10:30 AM
Pete Hegseth, if he does not resign, should at least get out of the way and let better men than him talk to the nation and to the press.
www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/…— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 6:26 PM
… Perhaps the Pentagon chief’s reluctance to speak to the press is just as well, because many Americans would be alarmed to realize that their sons and daughters in combat are being overseen by a person as callous as Pete Hegseth.
This morning, the defense secretary gave a briefing on the war that quickly degenerated into Trumplike bombast. (Wisely, the Pentagon scheduled this at 8 a.m. eastern time, when most of the country is either sleeping or busy starting their day.) Hegseth apparently prefers to sound more like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious secretary of defense: “Death and destruction from the sky all day,” he said, along with other empty phrases such as “We’re playing for keeps.” (As opposed to what, exactly?)
Most reporters are now accustomed to Hegseth’s drama-laden antics. But even by the low standards he has set, he managed to shock many of them when he cynically used the deaths of U.S. military personnel to air his own grievances with the press…
On Sunday morning (local time), an Iranian drone hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. The Pentagon says that six Americans are dead. Not only is this event a tragedy, but it also requires an explanation: The drone reportedly snuck through U.S. defenses without setting off any alerts, and struck a target that now seems to have been unduly vulnerable to aerial attack.
The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”
“Tragic things happen”? Hegseth said this as though it is unreasonable to look any closer at such events. He seems unable to grasp that the deaths of Americans are not merely a public-relations problem: When a drone slips through U.S. defenses and kills six members of America’s armed forces, the deaths of those servicepeople are the story. The people of the United States deserve to know what happened and why. Hegseth complaining that he’s not getting credit for all of the drones that didn’t get through is like an airline executive responding to an air disaster by growling about all of the planes his company made that didn’t crash…
In the midst of all this, Hegseth provided at least one moment of clarity: He showed, yet again, why he is an execrable choice to lead the Pentagon. Like his boss, he does not talk to the American people so much as put on performances for them, and this morning, he played the role of the Fox News pundit castigating other journalists. But the people in the briefing room were doing their job trying to get the facts. Unlike Hegseth, they are taking their responsibilities seriously: This is not a game, it’s not a TV show, and it’s not some adolescent test of wills…

