October 5, 2025
Dear editor;
Pete Hegseth was confirmed Secretary of Defense on strict partisan grounds and immediately proclaimed the least qualified Defense Secretary in American history.
Jonathan Chait, writer for The Atlantic, wrote after Donald Trump’s nomination of Hegseth, that it was “the most disturbing act of Trump’s presidential transition”. Hegseth was apparently best known for his public defense of war criminals and as a Fox News host, with no meaningful managerial experience.
His world view is well documented in his books where we are told climate change is a hoax, vaccines are poisonous, and that the Holocaust was perpetrated by German socialists.
He was confirmed in the Senate by the Republican majority.
Chait tells us that in the book, written by David Goodwin and Pete Hegseth, “Battle for the American Mind”, Hegseth argues the U.S. education system, public and private, is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot, the design of which has its roots in the “deist heresies of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson”; these heresies laid the groundwork to implant communist thought into the school system.
Hegseth claims our social sciences—history, political science, philosophy—are byproducts of Marxist philosophy. The conspiracy has worked and has begun seeping into the military, where it must be purged: generals, admirals, diversity, accountability, are all suspect under Hegseth’s jaundiced eye.
Shortly after confirmation, and after a few leadership purges, and an occasional sinking of supposed Venezuelan “drug trafficking terrorists”, Hegseth ordered bombing strikes in Yemen, but not before he misused a consumer- grade communication platform potentially compromising sensitive attack information to a magazine editor and who knows who else.
The attacks were apparently successful, but Hegseth’s competence was and still is seriously questioned; many others believed he should have resigned immediately. Yet, he still has the boundless temerity to order hundreds of flag officers on duty around the world protecting America’s military interests, to Quantico, Va. for a face-to-face meeting with the newly named Secretary of War.
What must have gone through the minds of the leaders of the greatest military force in history as they stoically sat and listened to a posturing performance by a mediocre major who proclaimed, “maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct… we’re going to raise-up warriors, not defenders”?
What then must have gone through their minds as they listened patiently to a president with apparent diminished mental capacity amble-on about “the enemy within” (meaning any among us with courage to disagree with his most often illegal executive proclamations) or the possibility of training troops within our “war ravaged” cities?
Jonathan Chait’s article can be found online at Atlantic, Nov. 21, 2024.
Please go in peace.
Dave Hoehne, Aurora