The American left has launched yet another campaign of personal destruction, this time targeting one of the most effective figures in President Donald Trumps administration: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
According to RedState, the pattern has become unmistakable. Progressive activists and their media allies are not primarily contesting the substance of Trump-era policies; instead, they are waging a relentless war on the people who implement them and the institutions that carry them out. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for example, has seen its reputation smeared despite broad public support for enforcing immigration law and getting rid of illegals.
The same playbook is being used against prominent conservatives such as Kristi Noem and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while Senator JD Vance has endured attacks on his faith, his wife, and his marriage, a deeply personal line of assault that reveals more about the lefts intolerance than about its targets.
The more effective an official is at restoring traditional American prioritiesstrong borders, a capable military, and a rejection of ideological fadsthe more vicious and unhinged the attacks become. Few in Trumps cabinet embody that dynamic more clearly than Pete Hegseth, whose tenure at the Pentagon has coincided with a determined effort to reverse years of politicization and cultural decay in the armed forces.
When Hegseth was nominated, the U.S. military was, in the eyes of many conservatives, circling the drain. Senior leadership had, as the article notes by invoking Scripture, sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, trading away warfighting excellence, honor, and loyalty to the nation in exchange for the latest academic fashions and identity-obsessed social engineering.
Instead of focusing on lethality, readiness, and victory, too many in uniform had been conscripted into serving whatever ideological trend was ascendant on elite campuses. The piece points out that this trend is now being checked in part by the Pentagon's recent policy on which schools are open to officers seeking advanced degrees, a move Hegseth has framed with the blunt declaration: We Train Warriors, Not Wokesters Hegseth Tells Prestigious University to Take a Hike RedState.
Hegseths reforms began almost immediately with a now-famous all hands session that required the attendance of every serving flag and general officer. In that gatheringdescribed in Pete Hegseth Makes a Much-Needed 'My Way or the Highway' Offer to Assembled Generals and Admirals RedStatehe laid down a clear marker that the era of ideological experimentation at the expense of combat effectiveness was over.
A central part of that message was a renewed emphasis on physical fitness, a traditional military virtue that had been diluted under the previous administration. Standards had been corrupted to ensure that every variant of sexual perversion would be able to pass even the most demanding schools in the military, a scathing indictment of the way identity politics had been allowed to override objective performance requirements.
By unapologetically waging war on wokeness in the ranks, Hegseth has become a lightning rod for progressive fury. His success in assembling a strong, like-minded team at the Pentagonand his evident rapport with the men and women actually serving in uniformhas only intensified the lefts resentment.
One of Hegseths most visible trademarks is his own physical conditioning. He does not merely preach fitness from behind a desk; when he visits units, he joins their physical training sessions, sweating alongside the troops and demonstrating that leadership, in his view, means leading from the front.
On Friday, that ethos was on display at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. There, Hegseth reconnected with the unit he had served with in Afghanistan, the storied 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry RegimentThe Rakkasans, a nickname derived from the Japanese term for falling umbrellas or parachutes.
As a young officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard, Hegseth had been an infantry platoon leader in that battalion, earning a reputation as a tough, capable, and shrewd combat leader. Returning to Fort Campbell as Secretary of War, he did what any serious soldier would expect: he joined the Rakkasans for PT.
Predictably, that decision became fodder for outrage and mockery from critics who, in many cases, appear unfamiliar with anything more strenuous than getting off the sofa. One example cited was a sneering headline: Pentagon Pete Hegseth Hits Up Old Platoon With U.S. on Brink of War With Iran, implying that the Secretary of War should be hunkered down in a bunker rather than engaging with troops.
The insinuation that a cabinet official must be physically chained to a war room at all times is strategically illiterate. Any potential operation involving Iran falls under the operational control of U.S. Central Command, and if the Secretary of War is personally micromanaging tactical planning, he needs to fire some people.
Moreover, telegraphing imminent operations by tracking the movements of a single senior official would be a gift to Americas adversaries. A serious national security posture requires that the presence or absence of one man not become an intelligence signal for hostile regimes.
What truly enraged Hegseths detractors was not that he exercised with the troops, but that he did so in a way that underscored traditional masculine virtues they have spent years trying to deride. Specifically, what particularly got their goat was Hegseth bench-pressing, and even more so that what really got them was his pressing 315 pounds.
The video shows a moment of genuine struggle. He almost didn't make it. There was a moment when Pete Hegseth ALMOST FAILED to complete the 315lb bench press. Yet he succeeded. These are the moments that define masculinity, and they are what made Western civilization great. We need more of them.pic.twitter.com/fFfaKJixSL.
That near-failure, followed by success, serves as an apt metaphor for Hegseths broader career. He has faced setbacks and fierce resistance, almost failed to make it, yet when the stakes were highest, he succeeded.
Almost immediately, social media filled with self-styled experts insisting that 315 pounds is trivial. One commenter boasted that three-fourths of the guys in his high school class could do the same, while others claimed the lift was staged or fake.
The article offers a pointed Reality Check to such armchair critics: Dude, do you see those troops standing there? Do you think a single one of them would let Hegseth get by with claiming he'd pressed 315 pounds if he'd really pressed 314? Anyone who imagines that enlisted soldiersespecially an E-4are too intimidated by rank to call out a false claim obviously know nothing about any branch of the U.S. military.
Then there were the self-declared experts who tried to debunk the lift by miscounting the weight on the bar. They argued that if the six plates weighed 45 pounds each, Hegseth had only pressed 270 pounds, thereby loudly announcing to the world they were utter strangers to moving iron because the bar itself weighs 45 pounds.
Among the media outlets piling on, The Daily Beast distinguished itself by descending into particularly petty territory. Before the Fort Campbell event, Hegseth had filmed himself lifting with his teenage son spotting for him, posting the clip with the caption: .@SECWAR CHECKING IN https://t.co/giqv7wn110 pic.twitter.com/PgikBxSRfi.
The Daily Beast framed this as a kind of abusive spectacle, running a headline that read: Pentagon Pete Berates Son Gunner for Nearly Ruining Publicity Stunt. Their narrative hinged on a brief exchange between father and son during the lift.
As he lifts the barbell off the rack, Hegseth continues to tell his son not to touch it, affirming, Ive got it, Ive got it. The outlet then described the mechanics of the lift in detail: The defense secretary dropped the bar down, bouncing it off his chest and pushing it back up toward the rack as his butt indeed lifts to support his efforts. As he nears the height to rest the bar back on the rack, he snaps at Gunner as he reaches to help.
Dont touch it! he exclaims, before lifting it up the rest of the way to rack the bar to clear one rep. Yeah! There we go, haaa! To anyone familiar with weight training, this is a routine interaction between a lifter and a spotter, not evidence of some dark familial dysfunction.
If you've ever spotted for someone or had someone spot weights for you, you recognize the pattern. The lifter must remain in control, signaling clearly when assistance is needed and when it is not, especially near the top of a heavy rep.
Good grief, if that was berating, I have no idea what they would've written if they'd watched me and my 17-year-old building a deck. The attempt to spin a father-son workout into a scandal reveals more about the ideological hostility of the outlet than about Hegseths character.
What emerges from all of this is a portrait of a defense chief who is forging an unusually direct bond with the rank and file. The bottom line is that Hegseth is building a bond with the rank and file unlike any Secretary of War/Defense in our history.
By lifting with the troops and holding himself to the same physical standards he expects of them, he is showing them that he can walk the walk he's imposing on them. That example inevitably sends a message up the chain of command as well: He's laying down a marker for their bosses, because if SecWar presses 315, you can bet there will be pressure on lots of colonels and generals to be seen lifting weights at the gym.
Under Hegseths leadership, the services are slowly reclaiming the professionalism that was eroded under Lloyd Austins tenure, during which diversity seminars and ideological litmus tests often seemed to take precedence over combat readiness. The services are recovering the professionalism destroyed by Lloyd Austin, and the cultural rot is being excised.
Because the militarys operational competence has improved, Hegseths critics find little traction attacking him on performance grounds. The competence of the military makes Hegseth immune from attacks in that quarter, so the left has to find something else.
What they have settled on is a campaign of derision and distortion over something as trivial as a weightlifting session with soldiers. And this is the crap they come up with: lying and mocking Heseth for lifting weights with the troops, when most of the critics would be hard-pressed to do a single rep of push-away-from-the-table, much less lift the plates.
They resort to this because their broader projectturning the armed forces into a laboratory for social experimentationhas been decisively rejected by those who actually wear the uniform. They do it because it is all they have left.
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