“Pete Hegseth just took his personal crusade to a new level”, 3 October 2026 (Photo via The Guardian — the original report)
As it ran on the front
I can defend the cuts. Twenty percent is the number you get when the problem is the generals' politics and not their headcount.
Start with the filing, because it came first. On September 15, Representative Thomas Massie put his name on articles of impeachment against the Defense Secretary, accusing him of an unlawful order to impose hostilities against Iran and of running the department on money and personnel Congress never authorized. That's not a tweet. That's a document with a case number.…
…(cont) Eight days later, The Hill described the dilemma that filing created. Republican leaders wanted no vote this month — ahead of the midterms, with the Iran war still unpopular and still running. Push it past the election into the lame duck and the dilemma doesn't disappear. It moves. In the lame duck, it's Democrats who'd have to choose: vote to remove a wartime secretary some of their own voters still back, or vote to keep him. Call that scheduling if you want. I'll call it scheduling too. The vote is getting moved to the room where it's hardest for the other side to win, and everybody in both rooms knows it.
Then September 30: the State of the Force address, the one where the cuts became official and the Secretary added the line — no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps — and then, same speech, same podium, announced a new Pentagon Office of Religious Affairs. I can tell you those are two separate agenda items, unrelated, one about personnel and one about chaplaincy support. Ask me which officers he expects to still be standing when that office opens and I'll tell you it's not my place to speculate.
Massie's filing predates the speech by fifteen days. It didn't need the speech to make its case. The speech just kept supplying more of it.
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“This is the same move every time: cut the brass that might push back, then open an office to tell whoever's left what to believe. They're not reducing waste, they're replacing judgment with obedience, and the one vote that could stop any of it got pushed to the room where it's hardest to win. That's not an oversight. That's the plan.”
“A twenty percent cut is just right-sizing a bloated flag officer corps — standard management, nothing ideological about it. And the religious affairs office is chaplaincy support, full stop, the same thing every modern military provides for its — okay, it was in the same speech as "no weirdos." I didn't connect those. Nobody told me to connect those.”
The US defense secretary who hates ‘beardos, weirdos and wimps’ has announced an Office of Religious Affairs at the Pentagon Apart from money and McDonald’s , there’s nothing Donald Trump seems to love more than a “ big, beautiful” wall . The government is currently spending billions of taxpayer dollars to fulfill the president’s fantasy…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
