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Hello and happy Saturday. The federal government shut down this week, but not before “Chunk,” a 1,200-pound brown bear who resides at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, was crowned champion of Fat Bear Week. Not only does Chunk get to enjoy all the glory that comes with winning the online voting contest, he’s soon heading off for six months of hibernation. I can’t be the only one who’s a little envious.
On Monday morning, we learned what prompted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to order more than 800 generals and flag officers from all corners of the globe to Marine Corps Base Quantico. Hegseth told them he was “ending the war on warriors.” The military had become too woke, and the time had come to “remove the social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics.” He also complained about “fat generals,” banned beards, and ordered daily physical training for “every warrior across our joint force.”
He said, “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters.”
In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio was decidedly unimpressed:
In a world where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t exist, Hegseth would be the most embarrassing member of the administration.
Rather than pay his deputies the respect of addressing them in a professional way, he appeared onstage before a comically enormous American flag and strode around performatively while speaking. It was what you’d expect at a Turning Point USA event or an infomercial (he plugged his own book at one point), not a major military summit.
Hegseth left it to President Donald Trump to explain just what the warfighters would be doing with their newly untied hands. The president gave an hourlong speech in which he bragged about renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War, claimed falsely he ended seven wars, criticized President Joe Biden on a number of fronts, and—ultimately—announced, “America is under invasion from within.” He complained that “radical left lunatics” in the Biden administration allowed unchecked immigration and that nations such as Venezuela and the Congo emptied their prisons and sent criminals to the United States. He said:
Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security.
For all the effort generals made to fly in on short notice, Michael Warren suspects they weren’t Hegseth’s true audience. The defense secretary was speaking to and performing for the president, he wrote:
[I]t seemed that the primary audience for Hegseth’s remarks at Quantico was not the military brass who took pains to quickly gather from far-flung corners of the world but Trump himself, who described himself in his own address as a “very aesthetic person” and who consumes information primarily through television. How else to explain the large American flag background (reminiscent of the opening monologue in Patton, whose title character is a favorite of Trump’s) and Hegseth’s dubious comparison between the current president and our greatest?
Hegseth’s ban on beards wasn’t his most notable declaration but it did prompt a nice reflection from Kevin Williamson about military dress codes. He noted that America has long had bearded soldiers, including Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, and that Hegseth himself has faced scrutiny over having tattoos that are associated with far-right movements. But what really galls Kevin is that Hegseth openly violates the U.S. Flag Code.
It forbids wearing the flag as an article of clothing, a rule Hegseth routinely flouts with his dopey flag-lined suits. It specifically forbids using the flag as a handkerchief, which Hegseth does habitually, tucking it into his chest pocket as a decorative pocket square—and surely, surely not because doing so makes it look like he is wearing some kind of military decoration.
Thank you for reading, and have a great weekend.
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I’ve heard a lot of parents (moms in particular) react to last week’s press conference. Some were angry; being told to avoid a useful medication by a bunch of men who have never been pregnant doesn’t play well. Some were scared that they had hurt their babies. Many were just confused. … When psychiatrist Leo Kanner first identified autism in 1943, he blamed the condition on emotionally cold mothers—another example of humanity’s age-old tendency to blame mothers for anything that goes wrong with their children. Trump telling women to take Tylenol only if they can’t “tough it out” is another version of the same argument women have been hearing about antidepressants, nausea medications, and dozens of other things for years. Maternal behavior is a convenient scapegoat. It’s not that behavior during pregnancy can’t be dangerous for the fetus—heavy drinking, opioid abuse, and certain medications are very damaging. But many things women are told to avoid simply do not fall in this category.
Most everyone is familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s views on cities. “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man,” he wrote to fellow Founding Father Benjamin Rush in 1800. … Instead, Jefferson set out an agrarian vision for the young republic, where republican virtues would be nourished not in overcrowded cities, but among the open lands of a growing nation. Likewise, government should be small and restrained, to allow the protection of individual liberties. Jefferson’s opposite was Alexander Hamilton, whose vision was decidedly urban and commercial. Their dueling visions fueled the first great factional fight in American history, between Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Repubican Party. This divide continues to be relevant in our own fractured and fractious age. The red state/blue state divide is the most obvious manifestation of this in 2025—but so is the rural/urban divide, first embodied by Jefferson and Hamilton. American cities—even in many red states—have leaned even more in the direction of the Democratic Party, while the further away from cities one travels, the more Republican the area becomes.
“Fatberg,” if you didn’t know, isn’t the Department of War’s new term for overweight Jewish soldiers—it’s the term of art for a mass of congealed fats, grease, and oil that combine with wet wipes and generic trash in sewer systems. Anyway, the point is that the progressive left is obsessed with the idea that everything is connected. “From Gaza to the climate,” one might imagine Greta Thunberg explaining, “it’s one supply chain of oppression: The war machine runs on the same fossil-fueled, settler-colonial patriarchal logic as border imperialism and the carceral state. Before we can provide housing for all, we must acknowledge the indigenous stolen land that the houses will be built on. Decarbonize, decolonize, democratize—all at once! Climate justice that isn’t trans-inclusive isn’t justice!” That’s parody, but there’s a reason it has the ring of truth.
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