We Know How The Mainstream Media Will Spin This

On Wednesday, The Gateway Pundit posted an article about one of the first things the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has done.

The article reports:

Disgrace General Mark “White Rage” Milley finally got his long-awaited comeuppance.

Fox News exclusively reported Tuesday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will “immediately” pull retired Gen. Mark Milley’s personal security detail and security clearance.

But the news gets even better: Hegseth will order the new acting Inspector General to conduct a review to ascertain whether evidence exists for Milley to lose a star in retirement due to his deceitful actions “undermining the chain of command” during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Fox News also reports that a second portrait of Milley will be removed inside the Pentagon. This one is from the Army’s Marshall Corridor on the third floor, honoring his service as chief of staff.

As TGP readers know, Milley did several things that arguably meet the definition of treason. First, Milley made two calls to an official in China’s People’s Liberation Army just months before Trump left office, assuring our most formidable adversary that he would give advance warning if the US were ever going to attack the communist nation.

Milley also made headlines for surrendering Afghanistan and arming the Taliban with $85 billion in US military equipment. Before fleeing Afghanistan in a rush in the fall of 2021, Joe Biden armed the Taliban terrorist organization with approximately $80 billion in US weapons.

The White House and Pentagon have never admitted to how many billion dollars worth of weapons they left behind for the Islamist group.

This will probably be reported by the mainstream media as a political move. It is not. Subverting the chain of command in the U.S. military is a serious offense. Calling someone in a country that has an adversarial relationship with America to tell them that you would give them advance warning of any hostilities is treason. President Biden preemptively pardoned the General from any past and future offenses, but I am not sure if that covers the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If it doesn’t, this may not be the end of this story. There is also the matter of the newly appointed Inspector General. As I said, the mainstream media will label this as political, but if America wants a strong military, everyone must be required to follow the same rules.

Discover The Networks

The latest hoax designed to slow down the Trump administration is the smear against Pete Hegseth to try to prevent his confirmation.

Breitbart posted an article on Tuesday revealing some of the details of the people behind the charges.

The article reports:

Danielle Dietrich, the estranged ex-sister-in-law of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is now claiming he abused his ex-wife, is a lifelong Democrat who is represented by a lawyer working for a prominent Democratic Party-connected firm.

Dietrich is represented by Leita Walker of Ballard Spahr, which “has a strong financial connection to Biden and some Democratic politicians,” according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. The news outlet reported:

Individual attorneys at Ballard Spahr have been politically active for at least the last three decades, according to data from Open Secrets. And their giving has skewed to Democrats.

But the firm’s political largesse nearly quadrupled in the Trump era. The previous high was $272,000 in 2008. In 2016, the firm’s attorneys gave $846,000. By 2020, political giving increased to more than $955,000, including $148,450 from a newly active political action committee.

The story continues:

NBC News reported that Senate Armed Services Committee committee staffers were in contact with Dietrich “for several days” before she submitted the affidavit and that she had chosen to come forward in response to a January 18 letter from Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the top Democrat on the committee, seeking “a statement attesting to your personal knowledge about Mr. Hegseth’s fitness to occupy this important position.”

The court documents and statements by Pete Hegseth and his wife are contrary to the charges:

Hegseth’s ex-wife, Samantha Hegseth, has denied the allegations herself. She wrote in an email to NBC News:

First and foremost, I have not and will not comment on my marriage to Pete Hegseth.  I do not have representatives speaking on my behalf, nor have I ever asked anyone to share or speak about the details of my marriage on my behalf, whether it be a reporter, a committee member, a transition team member, etc.

She added, “I do not believe your information to be accurate, and I have cc’d my lawyer.”

When she was asked what information was not accurate and for comment on the affidavit, she replied on Tuesday:

There was no physical abuse in my marriage. This is the only further statement I will make to you, I have let you know that I am not speaking and will not speak on my marriage to Pete. Please respect this decision.

Next, the Democrats will be pulling quotes out of Pete Hegseth’s high school or college yearbook.

About Those Nominees

On Thursday, Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at American Greatness about President Trump’s cabinet nominees. He took a stroll down Memory Lane in case some of us have forgotten some of the actions taken by President Biden’s Cabinet members.

In writing about Kash Patel as FBI Director, Victor Davis Hanson reminds us:

But what will Patel not do as the new director?

He will not serially lie under oath to federal investigators as did interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a current Patel critic.

He will not forge an FBI court affidavit, as did convicted felon and agency lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

He will not claim amnesia 245 times under congressional oath to evade embarrassing admissions as did former Director James Comey.

He will not partner with a foreign national to collect dirt and subvert a presidential campaign as the FBI did with Christopher Steele in 2016.

He will not use the FBI to draft social media to suppress news unfavorable to a presidential candidate on the eve of an election.

He would not have suppressed FBI knowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine—to allow the lie to spread that it was “Russian disinformation” on the eve of the 2020 election.

He will not raid the home of an ex-president with SWAT teams, surveil Catholics, monitor parents at school board meetings, or go after pro-life peaceful protestors.

Then Victor Davis Hanson talks about Pete Hegseth:

What will Hegseth likely not do?

Go AWOL without notifying the president of a serious medical procedure as did current Secretary Lloyd Austin?

Install race and gender criteria for promotion and mandate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training?

Insinuate falsely that cabals of white supremacists had infiltrated the military—only to alienate that entire demographic and thus ensure the Pentagon came up 40,000 recruits short?

Oversee the scramble from Kabul that saw $50 billion in U.S. military equipment abandoned to Taliban terrorists?

Watch passively as a Chinese spy balloon traversed the continental United States for a week?

Allow the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to promise his Chinese communist counterpart that the People’s Liberation Army would first be informed if the President of the United States was felt to issue a dangerous order?

Rotate into the Pentagon from a defense contractor boardship and then leave office to rotate back there to leverage procurement decisions?

Oversee the Pentagon’s serial flunking of fiscal audits?

Next, Robert Kennedy, Jr.:

But what will RFK also not do as HHS secretary?

Oversee his agencies circumventing U.S. law by transferring money to communist China to help it produce lethal gain-of-function viruses of the COVID-19 sort—in the manner of Dr. Fauci?

Organize scientists to go after critics of mandatory masking and defame them?

Give pharmaceutical companies near-lifetime exemptions from legal jeopardy for rushing into production mRNA vaccines not traditionally vetted and tested?

Leave office to monetize his HHS expertise and thus make millions from the pharmaceutical companies?

Please follow the link to the article–there is more!

The article concludes:

We are going to hear some outrageous things in the upcoming congressional confirmation hearings.

But one thing we will not hear about are the crimes, deceptions, and utter incompetence of prior and current government grandees.

The current crew, not their proposed Trump replacements, prompted the sick and tired American people to demand different people.

Voters want novel approaches to reform a government that they not only no longer trust but also now deeply fear.

True.

 

Grasping At Straws

We all remember Bob McDonnell, Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and others who were smeared by the Democrats when they were moving up the ranks in the Republican Party. Some moved forward despite the false allegations. In the case of Herman Cain, the allegations disappeared as soon as he dropped his presidential campaign. In the case of Bob McDonnell, he was convicted of a crime, but the conviction was overturned unanimously by the Supreme Court. The purpose of all of the attacks on these people was to derail their careers. All of the attacks turned out to be much ado about nothing. That is the Democrat playbook. Right now the two biggest targets are Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz.

On Saturday, The Post Millennial reported:

President-elect Donald Trump‘s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has been targeted by the Associated Press for Hegseth having what the outlet claims is a tattoo associated with “white supremacy” despite the ink being a Christian slogan. Hegseth blasted the outlet for displaying “anti-Christian bigotry” by spreading the claim.

AP reporter Tara Copp posted on her X account, that Hegseth “was flagged as a possible ‘Insider Threat’ by a fellow service member due to a tattoo he has that’s associated with white supremacists,” adding a link to a report that she and others published in the post. 

The outlet cited an email that said a tattoo on Hegseth’s bicep that says “Deus Vult,” which is Latin for “God wills it” is associated with white supremacist groups. After JD Vance posted a response to the report, Hegseth chimed in and wrote that it was “anti-Christian bigotry in the media on full display.”

…Hegseth previously worked for the District of Columbia National Guard and was pulled from guarding Joe Biden’s inauguration after a fellow Guard member wrote an email to superiors saying that the “Deus Vult” tattoo made Hegseth a supposed “Insider Threat” from the military.

The attacks by the Democrats on President Trump’s cabinet picks are a bit much. The Republicans approved President Biden’s cabinet which was much less qualified than President Trump’s selections. There is a definite double standard at work here.

Let The Hand-Wringing Begin

The uproar over President Trump’s Cabinet picks is somewhat humorous. Some of the people in the Biden administration were not particularly competent at their jobs and definitely did not represent mainstream America. Pete Buttigieg as Secretary of Transportation oversaw one of the worst rail disasters in American history–also one of the most poorly dealt with. Sam Brinton was caught stealing other people’s luggage. Rachel Leland Levine is an American pediatrician who served as the United States Assistant Secretary for Health. She was born a man and changed her gender. She also supported gender changes for children. President Biden’s Cabinet was the equivalent of the Star Wars bar scene.

On Wednesday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about the choice of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.

The article has a few interesting observations:

WHAT THE HEGSETH NOMINATION MEANS. On Tuesday evening, President-elect Donald Trump shook up Washington by announcing that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. “Pete is a graduate of Princeton University and has a graduate degree from Harvard University,” Trump said in the announcement. “He is an Army combat veteran who did tours in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For his actions on the battlefield, he was decorated with two Bronze Stars.” During his years as co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, Hegseth has focused extensively on military and veterans affairs. This year, he wrote a bestselling book, War on Warriors, in which he decried the new woke military.*

The fact is that despite his impressive qualifications — Princeton, Harvard, two Bronze Stars, and professional success — Hegseth does not have the resume one would expect from a secretary of defense, most notably the management experience to run one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, with an $841 billion budget this year. But Trump clearly wanted a change in direction. 

Trump can look at past secretaries who had the right resumes and didn’t work out. Bill Clinton picked a Democratic member of the House named Les Aspin, who had decades of experience overseeing the Pentagon and turned out to be a terrible secretary of defense. George W. Bush picked Donald Rumsfeld, who had vast experience in government and had even been defense secretary before, and Rumsfeld made grievous errors in the job. Barack Obama had problems with the Pentagon, and Trump himself struggled to find the right man to run the Department of Defense, going through five secretaries or acting secretaries in the first Trump administration.

The article concludes:

So now, Trump is proposing a radical change at the top of the civilian leadership of the military. It could be a breakthrough success, rebalancing the military as a fighting force above all else. Or it could be a failure, and everyone will be asking what Trump was thinking when he put Pete Hegseth in charge of an $841 billion bureaucracy. But if voters sent any message in the election, it is that they want a change from the Biden administration and that they approve, in a big-picture sense, of Trump’s leadership in his first time in office. So now, Trump is, as promised, bringing change.

“All the criticism of him is that he’s not the expected Washington pick, and I’m just saying to you that the American people just voted against the expected Washington pick,” CNN resident conservative Scott Jennings said Tuesday night. Yes, Hegseth will have to run the confirmation gauntlet in the Senate, Jennings continued, and will have to show that he has the knowledge to do that job. “But we ought to give this man a chance, in my opinion.” That’s what the election was about.

What we are doing isn’t working, let’s try something different.

Sometimes The Bias Is In What Is Left Out Of The Story

When the mainstream media is talking about the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, they are describing him as a Fox News host (and sometimes mentioning that he is a veteran) and not citing any reason he is qualified for the job. Although I hesitate to use Wikipedia as a source, its biographical information on conservatives tends to be accurate.

This is the information on Pete Hegseth at Wikipedia:

Hegseth was born in Minneapolis and raised in nearby Forest Lake.[6] He attended Forest Lake Area High School, where he graduated in 1999 as the valedictorian. Hagseth played football and basketball.

Hegseth went on to receive his Bachelor of Arts (BA) in politics at Princeton University in 2003.[7] While there, he wrote for the Princeton Tory[8] and played basketball for the Tigers under coach John Thompson III.[9][10] Their team made the NCAA tournament in 2001. They were knocked out in the first round by North Carolina, then captained by Brendan Haywood.[11][12]

In 2013, he received a Master of Public Policy (MPP) from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.[13]

…Following graduation from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth joined Bear Stearns as an equity capital markets analyst and was also commissioned as an infantry officer in the Minnesota National Guard.[15] In 2004 his unit was called to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where he served as an infantry platoon leader with the Minnesota Army National Guard. His unit was under the operational control of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment 101st Airborne Division. He was awarded the Army Commendation Medal. Shortly after returning from Cuba, Hegseth volunteered to serve in Baghdad and Samarra, where he held the position of infantry platoon leader and, later in Samarra, as Civil–Military Operations Officer. During his time in Iraq, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, Combat Infantryman Badge, and a second Army Commendation Medal.[16][citation needed]

He returned to active duty in 2012 as a captain. He deployed to Afghanistan with the Minnesota Army National Guard and acted as a senior counterinsurgency instructor at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul.[citation needed]

To me that sounds like a pretty good resume’ for a Secretary of Defense. It’s amazing how very little of those qualifications are being mentioned by the mainstream media. Generally the comment is ‘he’s a Fox News commentator and a veteran.’ None of the other qualifications are mentioned.