CLIP: Democratic women turned the Senate confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth into a feminist struggle session yesterday because he knows what a woman is.
As Pete Hegseth explains in his book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, the Obama and Biden administrations have imposed a dangerous denial of human sex difference on the Defense Department at every level, including the service academies. Such “transformation” was a central Biden administration priority in the Department of Defense.
It bears mention that when I decided to pursue a master’s degree in military history during 2020, I asked a tenured professor for his reading list in ‘origins of war’ theory and primitive warfare. He provided me with several references, but emphasized that he no longer teaches the topic because a student complained that his scientific statement about the male body being fitter for combat than the female body was actual violence against women.
I knew in that moment that leaving Democratic political organizing behind was not enough, that I would have to grind out this particular culture war until it was won, otherwise the cognitive stranglehold of gender ideology and ‘equity’ agendas on Democrats’ defense policy would eventually destroy the United States and kill tens of millions of Americans.
Pete Hegseth is simply correct that lowering standards to accommodate more women in combat roles has reduced American readiness to fight wars. This objective reality may hurt, but the enemy does not care, does not give trigger warnings, or respect pronouns, or care about your feelings. This is why drill instructors shout at recruits and say mean things: to toughen them up against much meaner things than angry Democratic women Senators.
Standards have also suffered from the accommodation of identity politics. To survive combat requires an internal locus of control. “If a soldier falls apart because they are called by the wrong pronoun, then they are not mentally strong enough to endure the rigors of combat,” Hegseth writes. “If they are not, then they have no business being in a combat-ready military force.”
He is right. Democrats hate that he is right. That’s what yesterday’s hearing was really all about. When Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) complained that Hegseth will “politicize” the Department of Defense, he was whining that a purely political program, DEI, will die under Hegseth, that standards will return, and ‘gender identity’ will be systematically purged from policies where it never belonged.
In his book, Hegseth presents numerous anecdotes from sources within the ranks. Training priorities across every force have been shifted from fitness and readiness to pronouns and rainbow identity PowerPoint presentations.
Ignore these reports, and the skeptical reader is still left with the Obama administration study which determined that a soldier in medical transition would be nondeployable for 34 weeks. Trump reacted to this report by banning transgender soldiers from the military. Biden reversed this policy in 2022, specifically waiving the 34 weeks of convalescent leave for a surgical transition.
Anyone familiar with how first-term enlistments work will see the issue. As a result of this policy change, Hegseth writes, a man can sign a three-year enlistment in the field artillery and have all the plastic surgery to ‘become a woman’ without spending a single actual day in the field, shooting the artillery.
Ignore what Hegseth says about the history of women in combat forces, and the reader must still confront the Obama-era experiment by the US Marine Corps which found that injury rates were twice as high among women, and that mixed-sex units underperformed all-male units in every test.
Hegseth is objectively correct that the new Army physical fitness test was supposed to be ‘gender neutral’ and the Pentagon could not succeed at this impossible task. Instead of a quick pre-breakfast activity on the training schedule, now the new PT test is a grueling organizational endeavor that puts the soldier through twice as many events and lasts all morning.
Putting women in combat roles has not made American combat units more effective. It has however complicated the meritocratic system of rank advancement, which was the actual point of the change.
“It’s not that individual women can’t be courageous, ambitious, and honorable,” Hegseth writes. Like this writer, “I know many phenomenal female soldiers. The problem is that the Left needs every woman to be as successful as every man, so they’ve redefined success in a counterproductive way.”
During yesterday’s hearing, Sen. Jean Shaheen (D-NH) noted that almost 20 percent of the force is female. To her mind, this is progress — the real dream, for her, is perfect 50-50 equality with men. Equity before victory!
Shaheen even entered a copy of Hegseth’s book into the congressional record, casting shame on him for noting that women are “objectified in the moral realm of war” by men on both sides. Shaheen’s ideology scorns human nature. “The problem is that a more empathetic and effeminate military isn’t a more efficient one. It’s a more inefficient one,” Hegseth says. “That puts everyone at risk.” It raises casualties.
It also loses wars, which are fundamentally macroeconomic affairs involving material and manpower, emphasis man. The average soldier carries 100 lbs (45kg) of kit and no amount of DEI training will ever change that. Democrats cannot change it. Believe this historian: the soldier’s load has always been too heavy, and better men than us have tried to reduce it, though rarely with any success. All but a very few women are being set up to fail under such burdens. Democrats kid themselves by imagining otherwise.
Pete Hegseth’s words are “harmful” to women in the services, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) complained. His sentences are “brutal,” “mean,” and they “disrespect” women. Gillibrand does not accept that special forces and infantry standards have been lowered for women to meet unofficial DEI quotas. It is untrue because she cannot believe it. A sniper is still a sharpshooter, no matter what their “gender identity” is, Gillibrand announced. What’s wrong with moms in combat? And how dare Hegseth question the lethality of the LGBTQ+ community!
Sen. Mazie Horono (D-HI) concluded that Hegseth wants to shoot protesters in the legs. She worried that as Secretary of Defense, Hegseth would obey orders from Donald Trump to invade Greenland and the Panama Canal. Also, shame on Pete Hegseth for his hateful words against women and the LGBTQ+ community!
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) thinks that Hegseth’s attitude towards women is “disqualifying.” Women should definitely be in combat, and moroever Hegseth is bad because he agrees, except that he didn’t agree a few minutes ago, other than when he agreed in his book published two years ago that some incredible women do actually serve in combat units. Also, the Senator seemed to be under the impression that Major Hegseth is a general. “I’m not a general, Senator,” he replied, drawing laughter from the room.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) argued with a straight face that Hegseth’s views on women disqualify him for the job because America’s enemies will see his wrong opinions as a weakness. “You can’t seem to grasp that there is no military without the incredible women who serve,” Duckworth ranted under a posterboard copy of the Soldier’s Creed. A decorated and disabled combat veteran, Duckworth became a protegé of Barack Obama and was then ruined by identity politics.
Of the Democratic women, only Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NY) was able to focus on something else. She questioned Hegseth’s commitment to American alliances and his past criticism of support for Ukraine. All the other Democratic women Senators were very focused on the toxic masculinity of Trump’s nominee.
Democrats are admittedly right to ask Hegseth about his seeming contempt for the law of land warfare and Geneva conventions. They are right that waterboarding should never make a comeback. But mainly, Democrats came across as very, very concerned that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will make the military prejudiced against women.
Just don’t ask them what women are.
Hegseth has worked with many women while serving in uniform. None were presented to the committee with tales of horrible prejudice or misogyny from Maj. Hegseth. Democrats were instead very eager to discuss Hegseth’s personal life out of uniform, including unsourced allegations. He hates women, see? Why, he has already married three of them!
Just don’t ask Democrats what women are.
“My only special interest is the warfighter,” Hegseth told the committee. Joe Biden’s woke military “fails to recruit the masculine men who make up our warrior class” and actively repels conservative white males, the military’s core recruiting demographic.
“The military doesn’t always make men good,” Hegseth writes, admitting that “anything can go sideways. But most of the things feminists hate about men, labeling them ‘toxic masculinity,’ are really just men that are undisciplined. Men that are chaotic, confused, and aimless.” (He is not wrong at all here.) A wartime military has no time for effete luxury beliefs in which young men somehow need less discipline.
Want more confusion? Let your schools go woke. Want more chaos? Let your cities go woke. Want more so-called toxic masculinity? Let your military go woke. Because, while America may run on Dunkin, our military runs on masculinity, properly channeled. It’s not toxic at all, it’s necessary. Just because the rest of our culture has gone soft, and effeminate, and apologetic — doesn’t mean our military can afford to. Staying tough, manly, and unapologetically lethal is the lifeblood of the fighting man.
“The military is supposed to be the bedrock definition of a meritocracy,” Hegseth writes. He believes women should have an equal opportunity to meet the military standards of the profession, and that the standards should be higher in the most elite units, even if that means fewer women will be in those units. Fewer marginal soldiers will increase performance. This is all quite anathema to the magical thinking of sex denial.
Democrats believe it’s a shame Hegseth doesn’t appreciate the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Because how can America possibly deter China from invading Taiwan without a comprehensive federal program to speak for the women and girls of the world?
Just don’t ask them what women are.
Democrats are clearly sold on this strategy. Their post-hearing fundraising emails will all champion women, though none of them could respond coherently if Pete Hegseth had simply asked them “What is a woman?” in reply to any of their questions.
For simultaneously, on the other side of Capitol Hill, Democrats were also proudly denying that human sex difference exists, or that it matters at all, in another physical realm of material, biological bodies. Only two Texas Democrats, Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, joined Republicans in advancing legislation to protect female sports in America. Only two.
Even Rep. Seth Moulton, who had expressed wrongthink about his daughters being run over by men on the sports field right after the election, was cowed by the alphabetical activists into voting against the bill, which more than 70 percent of Americans support. This is a political suicide pact.
Democrats are married to ideological human sex denial. It has become a sacred value to them, more real than American national security or American lives or American women or American votes. Pete Hegseth will not participate in their delusion, so they hate him for it. That’s what yesterday’s hearing was really about.
Oh, boo hoo!
Do you think anyone actually joined the US military just to get the free Frankenstein surgery? Or is it just a great excuse to malinger?