NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Piet Hegseth squeaked through his Senate confirmation on Friday and became America’s new Secretary of Defensebut he doesn’t have to thank Republican Senators Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.
For all three establishment and anti-Trump senators, the main objection to Hegseth’s move to the Pentagon’s top job was that they believe he does not have the requisite experience to lead the massive organization. Here’s how Murkowski put it in an his career doesn’t prove that. to me that he is prepared for such a huge responsibility.”
Pete Hegseth in uniform. (Fox News)
It doesn’t matter that Hegseth was educated at Princeton and Harvard and served for more than a decade in the U.S. Army infantry. Forget that he reached the rank of major while on tour in Afghanistan. And don’t forget, he’s a published author who has led experienced advocacy organizations. The problem for these senators was that Hegseth does not have the traditional qualifications to have worked for a defense contractor, the very type that has been captured over the past twenty years by the woke agenda that Hegseth has vowed to eliminate.
REPUBLICANS RESPOND TO PETE HEGSETH’S CONFIRMATION AS DEFENSE SECRETARY: ‘HE’S THE CHANGE AGENT’
Let’s take Trump’s last Secretary of Defense, the eminently qualified Mark Esper. Like Hegseth, Esper served in the military, but when he left active duty he held a menagerie of high-profile jobs at lawmakers, the Chamber of Commerce and eventually as vice president for defense company Raytheon.
This is exactly the kind of resume McConnell, Murkowski and Collins were looking for. Esper is the kind of guy who gets 90 votes to confirmation, just like he did in 2019, but in crafting that corporate resume, he looked the other way as the institutions he served embraced wokeness and DEI.
Here’s what Shanda Hinton, Chief Diversity Officer of Raytheon Technologies, had to say in 2023: “Advancing diversity, equity and inclusion is more than a goal – it is our duty and a critical part of our ESG strategy. This recognition only encourages us to continue pushing to create generational change.”
This was the soft cowardice of the old Republican Party, always afraid of being scolded by the left if they didn’t pretend that men could become women and America is a deeply racist country.
I’m not trying to argue that Esper is some kind of Ibram X Kendi when it comes to things like critical race theory. But he clearly looked the other way when these perverse progressive thinking took over.
This was the soft cowardice of the old Republican Party, always afraid of being scolded by the left if they didn’t pretend that men could become women and America is a deeply racist country. But now is the time for courage. That’s why Hegseth is the right man at this time. While the Mark Espers of the world watched as DEI programs and wokeness infected the military and defense industries, Hegseth wrote books about the left-wing institutional capture of our armed forces and schools.
The former “Fox & Friends” weekend host may never have been a C-suiter at a major company, but all of these companies have been complicit in the anti-merit-based policies that Hegseth promised to pull the plug on during his confirmation hearings in the Senate. .
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS ADVICE
In a very real sense, Hegseth is qualified because he is not “qualified.” Nearly anyone who checks the boxes that McConnell, Murkowski, and Collins demand would emerge from the same groupthink swamp that has made our military weaker in the name of diversity.
The American people voted for Trump in large part because they know the Democrats have gone crazy in the culture war. We don’t want men in women’s sports and we do want an army that focuses on being lethal and not on being politically correct.
If Hegseth gets in over his head, we’ll know pretty quickly, and I’ll happily apologize to his two opponents on the Republican side of the Senate aisle, but that will be very unlikely, and how high is the bar anyway if Biden DefSec Lloyd Austin just went missing for a few days and no one cared?
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Hegseth has a chance to fix the military the way Trump wants because the American people elected Trump to do just that.
Elections, they say, have consequences and a Hegseth-led Defense Department is a big consequence for those who want merit, fairness and competence in the military. It’s unfortunate, but perhaps not surprising, that Collins, McConnell and Murkowski couldn’t see this. Fortunately, Vance made sure their misguided opinions didn’t get in the way of real change at the Pentagon.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE DAVID MARCUS
