So What Kinds Of Illegal Orders Is Pete Hegseth Planning On Obeying?
Firing military lawyers is BIG UH OH.
In 2020, Hair Furor was super pissed that Gen. Mark Milley, his own choice for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, broke the bad news to him that active duty troops could not be dispatched into the streets of DC to shoot protestors “in the legs or something.” Donald Trump was forced to settle for tear-gassing them and menacing them with low-flying National Guard medical helicopters instead.
The military is not legally allowed to be used against the American people, at all, not even to shoot the messenger, and not even on undocumented immigrants. The military is supposed to protect us from outside threats, not protect President Bone Spurs from getting his feelings hurt.
Draft-dodger Trump also also flew into a white rage in 2022, when Milley explained to then-GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz what Critical Race Theory actually is, and why having students at West Point learn diverse perspectives and not to be racist to each other is good for military readiness, actually.
So, it’s fucking horrifying, but probably not surprising, that Trump 2.0 has kicked off with a Friday-night purge at the top ranks of the Defense Department, getting rid of anyone who might tell Trump or his DUI hire Shitfaced Pete “no,” or “that’s illegal, idiot.”
Trump fired chairman of the Joint Chiefs chairman Charles “CQ” Brown — a guy who has been serving in the military since Pete Hegseth was four years old — and also five other Pentagon officials: Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy; Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and most chilling of all, the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. Sure sounds like somebody is mighty hot to trot to break the law. Pete Hegseth even admitted as much, telling Fox News he wants lawyers that “don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything that happens in their spots. [...] it’s time for fresh blood.”
Anything that happens.
Yes, keeping the military from doing illegal things, that is their job. But apparently Pete reckons that something is not illegal as long as nobody tells you it’s illegal. Just like COVID cases go down when you stop testing for COVID, and a falling tree doesn’t make a sound if no one is around to hear it. Sooo what exactly is he planning to happen “in their spots”? And just whose fresh blood is he talking about?
Hegseth, of course, has been wanking off for years at the possibility of some kind of fresh new crusade of bloodletting across the land. Literally one of his books is called American Crusade, which calls for “categorical defeat of the Left” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” adding, “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” Yet!
And in his book The War on Warriors, he repeatedly urges readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” How he defines “Marxist,” well, that’s mighty vague.
He also derides military lawyers, AKA members of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, as “jagoffs” (hurr durr get it?) and complains about the Geneva Conventions like they are some kind of party downer, instead of rules that exist to protect civilians and also the mental health of soldiers who have to go home one day and live with their memories for the rest of their lives. “What do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva Conventions?” he wrote. “We never got an answer. Only more war. More casualties. And no victory.” What answer is he fishing here for? Rape them right back?
Human misery or the potential for a trip to The Hague aside, ignoring Geneva Conventions would also be horrible for recruitment, as most people sign up wanting to be one of the good guys. And if you only attract white Christian extremists who want to go berserker, your “talent” pool will be mighty small.
The lunkheaded heavily reported boozehound even has a battle cry from the Crusades tattooed on himself (Deus Vult, “God wills it”), which also happened to appear in the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter’s manifesto. The guy is even against democracy, which he claimed in a podcast called the Reformation Red Pill show that “our founders blatantly rejected as being completely dangerous.” Democracy is dangerous, gee, that sounds kind of Marxist! And for fun, he has reportedly been known to get drunk and chant “KILL ALL MUSLIMS!”
Did we mention that time he proudly lobbied Trump 1.0 to pardon servicemembers convicted of heinous war crimes?
Good thing Donald J. Trump has promised there will be no more war, because this guy really sounds like he wants the holy Christian freedom to go do some extreme war crimes of his own. What’s in his heart? Gassing some babies, doing some Russian-style battlefield rape and torture, pillaging some artifacts, bombing a couple of hospitals and then coming home to shoot some “Marxists,” a term that apparently means anybody who’s not a Christian Nationalist? We are literally just asking, and terrified of the answer!
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is planning to fire up to 61,000 civilian employees, starting with 5,400 next week, and institute a hiring freeze. Trump has also fired the boards of the service academies, and banned books in their school systems that teach kids to be nice to people, including Julianne Moore’s Freckleface Strawberry.
“The single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” Secretary Tipples DOUBLESPEAKED at an employee town hall at the Pentagon. “It served a purpose of dividing the force.” Of course, that is the opposite of true.
If you want to build the world’s most effective fighting force, you don’t want that force fighting each other. You need men than can drag a 200-pound body, sure, but you also need other skills, like people who can slip under a fence, or analyze intelligence, or draw from life experience that is broader than memorizing scripture at Father Wilson’s Jesus Academy and getting whipped with a belt. You need as large of a force as possible, and you need to build alliances. And you need some kind of moral high ground, as you will not be “welcomed as a liberator” like Dick Cheney if you’re perceived as just as bad as whatever dictator you are trying to overthrow. (Or whatever democratically elected government you or Vladimir Putin doesn’t like.)
But, well, here we are, one month in, and we’ve already alienated every single ally, even Canada. Just going down Putin’s Christmas list, giving him every single gift! Weak military, check! Crumbling economy, coming right up! Americans getting the measles, check! Ukraine, just working on finding a big-enough bow.
Here we go down the slip-and-slide to fascism, everybody! This is gonna be a bad ride.
And this is why DUI-hires are bad.
Does Knucklehead Smiff Hegeseth know how hard it is for anyone to become an Admiral, by definition one of the highest-ranking officers in one of the best navies in the world?
He just hates her because she's a woman.