Good afternoon, America.
I’m not a General. I’m just a pissed off American.
I watched Pete Hegseth’s State of the Force speech so you don’t have to. I took one for the team and wasted fifty fucking minutes of my life I’ll never get back to say the following. I listened to him bloviate on about drones, billionaires, Bible verses and without skipping a beat, the line he’ll be remembered for most in all the history books: “No fatties, no tr*nnies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
Pete, you’re the kind of intellectual void that genuinely thinks loudness and bullying is conviction and machismo defines manhood. You’re a man so at war with himself he’s drafted the entire country into a highly unpopular and useless fight. You’re a hollow, self-loathing caricature of what it means to be a man, so terrified of your own inadequacy that you’ve mistaken cruelty for strength and bluster for virility.
Your vision of America is a fever dream, and you’re just a grotesque thing in it.
I’m a mother and wife soldiers and spent an entire career working with kids. I’m going to break my own rule here, because I firmly believe it’s ok to be mean to mean people. If I’m wrong, I trust karma will sort it all out later. But for now, I don’t think that logic is wrong, but any default. Let’s call it an indispensable loophole when fighting bad people.
I spent years teaching small children and the very first thing you teach a room full of four-year-olds is that we don’t call people names. We don’t make lists of who gets to play. Every preschool teacher in America could have told the SECDEF Ken-doll that on day one. Instead, he chose to stand in front of a thousand of our best and brightest and spewed hate in front of them like an errant child.
So let’s talk about who’s on his list.
It’s the trans soldier who passed every PT test, earned every evaluation, then got sent home shitting on all their honorable achievements anyway. It’s the Black soldier whose shaving waiver exists because of a skin condition that hits Black men the hardest. It’s the Sikh, the Muslim and the Jewish service members whose beards are an act of faith. It’s the airman who put on weight after a third deployment and a second baby. It’s the “wimp” who reported abuse up the chain. It’s the “radical” who actually read the Constitution.
And it’s us. The parents who pack the duffel bag, waving our kids goodbye, and don’t sleep right again until they’re home.
I grew up on the Iron Range in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Mining towns. Long egregious winters. Kids who enlisted because the military was the surest road out.
(Yes, that’s me, at the Army Reserve Center doing my monthly drill — Lunch time always meant nap time.)
Because that’s the path the billionaire owners of the United States built for us.
Bearded, chubby, weird, scared, brave kids. Not one of them signed up to be “central casting,” like Hegseth likes to say. They signed up to serve because they truly believed our country was worth protecting. But they were lied to. We all were.
He called last year’s speech Liberation Day.
Bollocks! Liberation from WHAT, exactly? From inspectors general? From complaint systems that give a nineteen-year-old private a way to report the sergeant who assaulted her? (He calls those people complainers.) Which begs the question, if Hegseth was raped or assaulted by powerful men in charge would he consider himself a “complainer”?
A military that silences them isn’t stronger. It’s just quieter and turns insidious. It’s no secret that quiet is where predators thrive.
He bragged about firing one in five generals and said civilian control of the military isn’t a suggestion, it’s the plan. But, civilian control means the people’s government, under the Constitution. It doesn’t mean loyalty to one dementia ridden man who simps to dictators.
Every soldier swears an oath to the CONSTITUTION. Not to a president. Not to a secretary. Not to a party. A general who refuses an unlawful order isn’t a traitor for crying out loud. He’s the reason that whole goddamn oath exists.
“Diversity is not our strength,” he said. “Unity is our strength.”
Pete. You dumbfuck. Those aren’t opposites.
Unity has never meant everybody looks the same, prays the same, or loves the same. Unity is what happens when people who have nothing in common decide they’d die for each other anyway. Ask the Navajo code talkers. Ask the Tuskegee Airmen. Ask the Japanese American 442nd, who fought for a country that had their families locked behind barbed wire.
They didn’t make America strong in spite of their differences.
They made America strong because this country had room for every one of them. It was built by them.
Then he turned his vitriol on the press and used the word treason. About reporters. You’ve GOT to be kidding me. Reporters are the reason we know about burn pits, moldy barracks and assaults buried by commanders. The things their budget was approved to fix, Petey promised he would fix and never fixed because Petey-boy misappropriated funds.
They uncovered all those stories that got troops care, the Pentagon tried to hide away. A man who calls the free press treasonous isn’t protecting soldiers. That sounds like a coward protecting himself and his yes-men.
And then came Iran and he said FAFO. War isn’t a mother fucking punchline, Pete. Most Americans oppose this war and the polls have said so all year. We are not a bloodthirsty people. We are a TIRED people, tired of sending our children to fight oil wars that powerful billionaire men start from air-conditioned rooms and never have to finish or send their own sons to fight.
“Our boys come home, the enemy does not” sounds real tough until it’s your boy who doesn’t.
Fuck you Pete. Fuck you straight to the burning pits of Hell from this Blue Star Mother. I sit here at home holding on to hope with every breath, that my blue star never turns gold, while you pray to your white Jesus another zero gets added to the end of your bank account. You bitch-ass Nazi. Fuck you.
Hegseth told our troops to feel comfortable inside the violence, that lethality is their calling card. No. Their calling is protection. Lethality is a tool, and sometimes a terrible necessary one, but a soldier who loves the violence more than the people he’s protecting has lost the plot, you gigantic ignoramus. Spoken like a true dummy who’s never seen a day of combat in his life.
Every combat vet I know came home hating war more than anybody — including my husband who was ordered to do over 200 missions outside the wire in Afghanistan. Don’t speak on things you know nothing about Pete.
He even dragged the golden rule into it.
“Do unto your unit as you’d want done to your own child’s unit.”
Sure. I’ll take that test, as a mother, any day of the fucking week. Would I want my child serving under an unqualified pseudo-Nazi who calls his own troops slurs from a stage? Who sets women’s standards at the highest male score and then tries to say they’re the problem? Who treats a soldier’s body, faith, or identity as something to scoff at?
Hell no.
Then he asked for a trillion and a half dollars and introduced a panel of billionaires to dream up the future of war. As if Elon Musk knows anything about war besides the war he fights within himself. And the only question I want answered is who’s getting paid?
Before we fund one more drone, fund the barracks. Fund the VA. Fund childcare and mental health care for the families holding everything together back home. And when machines start choosing who to kill, like an innocent girls school in Iran, a human being had better answer for every single fucking life.
And that human being needs to be you Pete.
Accountability doesn’t get automated unless you want us to get the guillotines and pitchforks out.
Hegseth wants to bring the troops home and build a fortress. Great! Bring them home. But home can never mean turning them on the people they swore to protect. And a fortress isn’t just made up of concrete and generators. A country is strong when its schools are funded, its hospitals stay open and its neighbors show up with a casserole when somebody’s struggling.
That’s the fortress, Pete — you stupid son-of-a-bitch.
He sneered at our colleges as anti-American and then listed a bunch of schools he approves of. Patriotism doesn’t come from one campus or one ideology. Questioning your country isn’t hating it. It’s how you love it enough to make it better.
And then he brought God into it, said he created an Office of Religious Affairs that reports straight to him, and announced the military will put on the “full armor of God”.
Now, wait a goddamn minute.
Listen, faith is sacred. That’s EXACTLY why it can’t be ordered. Religion is a personal journey and no government, no general, no out-of-his-fucking-mind SECDEF has any right to force it on a man, woman, or child. That’s the First Amendment, written by people who crossed an ocean to get away from governments that told them how to pray.
Chaplains matter. They sit with the Baptist AND the Buddhist, the Catholic AND the atheist, the kid who prays every night AND the one who’s never prayed a day in their life. The minute faith becomes a chain of command, the soldier who believes differently becomes a stranger in his own unit.
And that soldier still bleeds red, white, and blue last I checked.
He closed with Isaiah. “Lord, here I am, send me.”
Jesus Christopher Christ. Please do send him. When our marines end up on Kharg Island to get slaughtered, make sure Hegseth is front and center.
In the meantime, send me to stand between a trans kid and a bully. Send me to the school board, the polling place, the town hall. Send me to the neighbor who’s scared of a knock at the door. Send me to the veteran who served with honor and got thrown out anyway. Send me to tell the truth when powerful men pervert it saying it’s treason.
He told our troops they’re set apart, that they shouldn’t want to look like civilians. But our soldiers aren’t some separate breed. They came from our towns. Our churches and mosques and synagogues. Our kitchen tables. They are us.
That’s patriotism.
Not a uniform where everyone looks the same. Not a whitewashed God that’s force-fed down our throats from a podium. Not a love of violence. Patriotism is loving your country enough to fight for ALL of its people, especially the ones powerful men are itching to throw away.
We’re the beardos.
The weirdos.
The wimps and the radicals.
The ones he couldn’t name without a fucked up slur.
And we are done being quiet.
So here’s my question to you Pete, you filthy degenerate. When you’re done bastardizing the United States military and finished purging everyone who doesn’t fit your mold, who exactly do you think is left to defend white boy?
Because there’s more of us than there are of you and we’re taking meticulous notes. We won’t forget what you and your regime of dipshits have done to this country and the rest of the globe.
And there is a reckoning coming.
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No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.
Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
~Eevie
No one says it like you. Your ferocity empowers more people than you probably imagine.
That sloppy seconds motherfucker is just waiting to be impeached. Washington DC won't be ready for the fury that those of us who took that oath and still stand behind it today will bring if they don't get his ass out of that position and fast!