Hegseth, Who Thinks Women Shouldn’t Serve, Changes Military Standards

Women can say goodbye to combat opportunities in the U.S. military.

Speaking to hundreds of America’s top military commanders at a mandatory in-person assembly in Quantico Tuesday morning, War Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled his latest efforts to de-woke the country’s armed forces. Unfortunately for half of the population, that included resetting military combat requirements to the “highest male standard only.”

“When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral,” Hegseth said. “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”

Women made up 17.3 percent of America’s active-duty force in 2021, with more than 231,000 members. That same year, they composed 21.4 percent of the National Guard, according to a demographics report from the War Department.

“But in many ways it’s not their fault, as foolish and reckless as the ‘woke department’ was, those officers were following elected political leadership,” Hegseth said. “An entire generation of generals and admirals were told that they must parrot the insane fallacy that ‘our diversity is our strength.’

“They had to put out dizzying DEI and LGBTQI+ statements. They were told males and females are the same thing. Or that males who think they’re females are totally normal,” he continued.

Despite fearmongering over the supposed rampant encroachment of transgenderism, an August study by UCLA’s Williams Institute found that less than 1 percent of the country actually identifies as transgender. Their representation among those in uniform is even lower—about 0.2 percent of the country’s military has received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, according to February figures from the military.

But fueling the culture wars was at the forefront of Hegseth’s mind. The former Fox News host’s new policies will also discriminate against enlisted people of color by nixing medical beard waivers, a decision that will disproportionately affect Black service members due to the potentially injurious effects of frequently shaving their faces, given the curl pattern of their hair.

“No more beardos,” Hegseth said. “Calling someone to shave, or work hard, is exactly the kind of work force we want.”

(The military has a long and strange history with beards, changing its hygiene requirements and regulations every few decades.)

Any service member who disagreed with the order was welcome to resign, according to Hegseth.

“If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign,” Hegseth said. “We would thank you for your service.”

Hegseth has openly said before that he does not believe women should serve in combat roles. During a November interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, Hegseth said, “I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.”

The leader of America’s armed forces risked U.S. national security Tuesday in order to taunt the Trump administration’s perceived foreign enemies.

Speaking to the country’s top military commanders during an unprecedented mandatory in-person assembly, Pete Hegseth emphasized that the recently renamed War Department was reimagined for a reason.

“To our enemies: FAFO,” Hegseth said, using an acronym that translates to “Fuck around and find out.”

Hegseth ordered hundreds of U.S. military officials around the globe to meet him at a spontaneous assembly in Virginia, keeping the details of the gathering extremely hush-hush.

There are approximately 800 U.S. generals and admirals in total. Hegseth’s order applied to “all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above, or their Navy equivalent, serving in command positions and their top enlisted advisers,” insiders told The Washington Post. It does not apply to military officers who hold staff positions.

The message shocked members of the U.S. military, who could not recall another instance in which a defense secretary summoned so many commanders for a sudden in-person meeting—especially without a clear rationale. Some warned that having so many integral military leaders in one place could pose a national security risk.

As it turns out, the rationale was to rail against the culture wars. Hegseth, pacing back and forth onstage, also leveraged his time in front of America’s military to criticize “woke” ideology. He ordered the armed forces to reset its combat requirements to the “highest male standard only,” a decision that would effectively force women out of the military.

“If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is,” Hegseth said.

The Pentagon chief also nixed medical beard waivers, a decision that will disproportionately affect Black service members due to the curl pattern of the hair on their face.

“No more beardos,” Hegseth said. “Calling someone to shave, or work hard, is exactly the kind of workforce we want.”

New reporting from MSNBC thickens the Tom Homan bribery plot.

Earlier this month, the outlet revealed that Homan was caught accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover agents in September 2024, as part of an FBI investigation that’s since been closed by the Trump administration. The soon-to-be border czar had reportedly promised the agents, who posed as businessmen, he’d help them secure federal contracts once Trump won the election and he assumed his post.

On Monday, MSNBC reported that the FBI investigation into Homan began after Julian Calderas—a former ICE official, who worked under Homan during the Obama administration—allegedly told the undercover agents that Homan could help them eventually score contracts if they coughed up $1 million.

Calderas, who, like Homan at the time, ran his own private government contracting consulting firm, allegedly brought the plan to the undercover agents in May 2023—which ultimately led to the meeting in which Homan accepted the $50,000, and during which Calderas also reportedly accepted $10,000.

According to “sources familiar with the probe,” MSNBC reports, the FBI felt it must initiate an investigation into Homan “after Calderas told agents in an unrelated investigation that Homan was willing to influence which companies would win federal contracts in a second Trump administration in exchange for money.”

When asked if he knew about the criminal investigation, Calderas told MSNBC “I know nothing about this,” and, “If this is the case, I’m going to need to talk to my lawyer.”

That the Homan investigation branched off of an existing investigation into Calderas—an associate and supporter of Homan, per his digital footprint—cuts against the Trump administration’s already fatuous argument that Homan was the victim of a “blatantly political investigation” by the Biden administration “to target President Trump’s allies.”

Democratic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker once again used his bully pulpit to rebuke President Trump after federal agents marched through downtown Chicago, kidnapped people, shot a pepper ball (essentially a paintball full of pepper spray) at a journalist’s vehicle, and fired tear gas at peaceful protesters.

“In any other country, if federal agents fired upon journalists and protesters, when unprovoked, what would we call it? If federal agents marched down busy streets, harassing civilians and demanding their papers, what would we say? I don’t think we’d have any trouble calling it what it is: authoritarianism,” Pritzker said at a press conference Monday afternoon. “So let’s not pretend it’s something else when it happens in our American cities.”

This weekend, there was a surge in federal immigration enforcement in Chicago as armed agents patrolled the city. Pritzker on Monday said that Trump is also planning to deploy 100 military troops to Illinois.

Chicago has been on Trump’s hit list since Trump announced his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., in August, along with multiple other mostly Black cities like Baltimore and Memphis. Earlier this month, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore—Robert Duvall’s character from Apocalypse Now—with Chicago burning in the background.

Pritzker—along with California’s Gavin Newsom—has been among the loudest voices as governors across America prepare to have their power and state sovereignty stripped. Only time will tell how much they’ll be able to stop Trump, as any resistance to the president’s draconian federal invasions will require cohesion from state leaders, local leaders, businesses, and neighbors. A fight is certainly coming, and Pritzker and Chicago seem up for it.

One of MAGA’s most outspoken proponents is turning on the White House over its handling of the Epstein files.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—a longtime ally of the president and a standout feature of his sweeping national ideology—was reportedly infuriated by the Trump administration’s hostility toward legislation supporting the unfettered release of the files. But it was a direct threat from the White House over her own support for their release that prompted her to phone a West Wing official.

“I told them, ‘You didn’t get me elected. I do not work for you; I work for my district,’” Greene recalled to The New York Times. “We aren’t supposed to just be whipped on our votes because they’re telling us what to do … or saying, ‘We’ll primary you,’ or that we won’t get invited to the White House events.”

“Me personally? I don’t care,” Greene continued. She explained to the Times that, these days, when the Trump team attempts to corral or control her, she’s “like, ‘[expletive] you.’”

Greene has publicly broken with Donald Trump several times since his inauguration, differing from her “favorite president” on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Viewed as something of a joke when she first arrived on Capitol Hill in 2021, the renowned conspiracist has since become a powerful independent agent, apparently beholden to no party and no man.

“I didn’t get elected with a President Trump endorsement,” Greene told the Times. “It felt really bad at the time, but honestly it’s been the best thing for me. I get to be very independent.”

Meanwhile, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague Trump. Instead of simply disclosing the contents of the files, the Trump administration has expended vast resources to reportedly strip the president’s name from the documents. The White House also tapped Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell to produce a new list of the deceased financier’s associates, which presumably already exists in the Epstein files. The plot granted Maxwell improved living conditions, moving her to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, and gave her time on the national stage to ask Trump for a pardon.

The Epstein story has remained an anomaly in Trump’s political career. For the better part of a decade, the MAGA leader became adjusted to an undyingly loyal base that rarely skews from or challenges his political vision. But Trump’s proximity to Epstein and his heinous crimes has been an outlier, prompting doubts that have undercut Trump’s influence with large swaths of his followers.

President Trump’s sweeping new national security memorandum will likely double the FBI’s domestic terrorism watchlist from 5,000 people to 10,000, according to journalist Ken Klippenstein. 

Trump issued the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NPSM-7, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” last week. The memo directs the federal government to investigate and prosecute any person, nonprofit, or entity displaying what Trump calls “indicia” of political violence: anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism” on race, gender, and migration. 

The memo continues:

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically.... It is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.  A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them—is required. 

These broad categorizations would incriminate millions of people, hence the doubling of the domestic terrorism watchlist. The watchlist was created directly after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and also includes the no-fly list. 

“Individuals, including U.S. persons (i.e., U.S. citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents), may be nominated for inclusion in the terrorist watchlist if they are known or reasonably suspected to be engaged in terrorism or terrorist activities, or are associated with known or suspected terrorists, among other criteria,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a study just last month. Now President Trump has greatly expanded the parameters, allowing the government to label everyone from George Soros to a few leftists with a Signal chat as domestic terrorists. 

In that same study, the GAO acknowledged that “some U.S. persons (i.e., U.S. citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents) have been misidentified as being on the watchlist or remained on the watchlist when no longer warranted.” It’s unfortunately likely that this unfortunate, authoritarian trend will only increase tenfold now. 

There’s no other way around it—McCarthyism is so back. 

President Donald Trump on Monday once again showed his inability to think about geopolitics in terms of anything other than real estate, as he unveiled a shocking Gaza peace plan.

“Let us not forget how we got here,” he said at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where he touted the new proposed peace plan. “Hamas was elected by the Palestinian people. Israel withdrew from Gaza, thinking they would live in peace. Remember that? A long time ago, they withdrew.”

Trump was referring to Israel’s 2005 removal of its ground troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip (which, contrary to Trump’s telling, occurred before Hamas won legislative elections in 2006).

Israel’s withdrawal, Trump opined, had been a mistake, relinquishing prime real estate along the Mediterranean Sea: “They pulled away. They let them have it. And I never forgot that because I said, ‘That doesn’t sound like a good deal to me.’ As a real estate person, I mean, they gave up the ocean, right?” he said. “They gave up the ocean. I said, ‘Who would do this deal?’”

Notably, Israel did not “[give] up the ocean” in 2005, but retained control over Gaza’s shore, borders, and airspace. And after Hamas seized power in 2007, Israel imposed an indefinite land, sea, and air blockade that remains in place, restricting Gazans’ freedom of movement and access to natural resources.

But, per Trump’s telling Monday, Israel was “very generous” in giving up “the most magnificent piece of land, in many ways, in the Middle East.”

It’s not the first time the president has approached Gaza with this sociopathic lens. In July, Trump (after bizarrely implying he coined the term “the Gaza Strip”) called Israel’s 2005 withdrawal “one of the worst real estate deals ever made,” because Israel “gave up the oceanfront property.”

Israel and the U.S. are “beyond very close” to achieving a peace deal regarding Gaza, according to Donald Trump.

Delivering a slurred speech beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House Monday, the U.S. president claimed it was a “historic day for peace” in the Middle East, underscoring that the two countries were on the cusp of brokering a deal to end Israel’s assault on the West Bank.

“At least we’re at a minimum very, very close, and I think we’re beyond very close,” Trump said.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu was very clear about his opposition to a Palestinian state,” he continued, “and I understand and respect his position on many things, but what he’s doing today is so good for Israel.”

The Trump administration’s plan proposed to end the conflict after Hamas returns the remaining Israeli hostages, living and dead. The militant Palestinian faction will have 72 hours to comply after Israel accepts the agreement, according to Trump.

The plan would additionally have Israeli forces slightly withdraw and exchange their own Palestinian hostages, including 250 Palestinians serving life sentences and 1,700 Gazans who have been in Israeli detention since the war began nearly two years ago.

Trump’s breathless and rambling interpretation of the deal was contradicted by Netanyahu moments later, when the Israeli leader made it clear that he was already on board with the White House’s plan.

“I support your plan for ending the war in Gaza which achieved our war aims,” Netanyahu said.

It was not clear if Hamas agreed to the peace terms, but their consent is apparently not necessary. Trump said Monday that Israel has the “full backing” of the U.S. to defeat Hamas if it refuses the proposed arrangement.

President Donald Trump’s new plan to stop Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians involves handing himself total control of Gaza—and of course, some good, old-fashioned real estate development.

Ahead of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, the White House released Trump’s plan to take over Gaza by creating an international “Board of Peace” to oversee its development and governance. The board will be chaired by one man: Trump.

The so-called Board of Peace would handle funding Gaza’s “redevelopment,” until the Palestinian Authority implements its own reform plan that satisfies Trump’s standards and “is conducive to attracting investment.” The board would also oversee a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” to govern Gaza, composed of “qualified Palestinians and international experts.” The board would likely retain broad discretion over its members.

It’s worth noting that while speaking in a joint press conference Monday, Netanyahu seemed to dismiss an agreement involving the Palestinian Authority. Still, he told Trump that he would “support” his plan.

Israel’s years-long military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 65,000 people, displaced nearly two million more amid widespread destruction, and sparked a deadly famine the Israeli government still claims is a hoax. The sweeping humanitarian catastrophe was bought and paid for by the U.S. government’s support of Israel. Now, Trump intends to stake a flag in the rubble.

Trump’s plan said Israel would not occupy Gaza, and that the U.S. would enlist other Arab nations to police the region. Rather than Gaza being occupied by the Israeli military, the plan pitched something called the “International Stability Force”: an international collaboration that would function as a “long-term internal security solution.” (If only a similar group of united nations already existed…)

“A panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East” would create an economic plan to “rebuild and energize” Gaza, the plan stated. The plan also referred to investment and development pitches from “well-meaning international groups.”

The plan makes good on Trump’s promise to transform Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” While Trump’s original plan from February pitched a functional ethnic cleansing, now Palestinians would not be forced to leave. “Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough,” the plan stated.

Senate Republicans have a glorified resort vacation scheduled just days after the looming government shutdown deadline.

Politico’s Playbook obtained an invitation for the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s fall “meeting” at the five-star Sea Island Resort in Sea Island, Georgia, October 3–5. Their schedule will include buffet meals, pickleball, golf, shooting, and lawn games—all as the fates of millions of Americans hang in the balance. Rates per night range from $495 to $599 per night, and the entire trip is paid for by the NRSC.

When asked by Playbook if Senate Republicans still plan to visit the resort if the government shuts down, which looks incredibly likely, an NRSC spokesperson refused to comment.

On Tuesday, September 30, Congress will either pass a destructive continuing resolution that will slash funding for health care and homeless shelters and increase spending on mass deportation and war—or shut down the government and give Trump an excuse to furlough or fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers. Pickleball really isn’t appropriate at a time like this.

The Democrats, for what it’s worth, aren’t innocent, either. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s “Napa Retreat” is scheduled for October 13–14, shortly after the Republicans’, and on what would be day 12 of a shutdown. And while there is still uncertainty about whether the government will remain open past September, the fact that our leaders already have their vacations planned either way does not inspire hope.