Pete Hegseth Sent National Guard Troops Home for Being Too Fat

The military has no more space for overweight soldiers.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegesth confirmed Monday that he had sent some of the Texas National Guard members stationed in Illinois back to their home state for failing to meet the department’s new height and weight requirements.

“Standards are back at The @DeptofWar,” Hegseth wrote on X, circulating a screenshot of an article announcing the sudden change of the guard.

The troops’ departure followed public backlash to a string of photos published by ABC News, which captured several heavyset Texas National Guard members as they arrived in the Prairie State.

“In less than 24 hours, Texas National Guardsmen mobilized for the Federal Protection Mission,” a department spokesperson told military news website Task & Purpose over the weekend. “The speed of the response necessitated a concurrent validation process, during which we identified a small group of service members who were not in compliance and have been replaced.”

But fat people aren’t the only individuals that the former Fox News host has chosen to discriminate against: Hegseth announced new physical expectations for U.S. troops during a rare assembly of the military’s top brass late last month. Speaking before hundreds of America’s top military commanders at a mandatory in-person meeting in Quantico, Hegseth unveiled his latest efforts to de-woke-ify the country’s armed forces, including 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 during his speech. “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.”

In the same speech (that military leadership found pointless and uninspiring), Hegseth pledged that there would be “no more beardos” in the U.S. armed forces, 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.

Ironically, Hegseth’s strict new standard is undermining one of Donald Trump’s goals: sending troops to U.S. cities.

It looks like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new press policy will ensure that the only outlet with a desk inside the Pentagon is a MAGA propaganda machine.

Hegseth, who has reportedly been “consumed” by trying to stop numerous leaks from his department, has moved to install a new “pledge” for journalists covering the Pentagon, requiring them to abstain from receiving any unauthorized material. Under the new rules, all agency information “must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” and those who fail to follow the policy would have their credentials revoked.

If Hegseth wanted a press he could control, it seems he may be getting his wish. Nearly every mainstream outlet has balked at the policy. As of Tuesday morning, it looks like the only news outlet that will retain access to the Pentagon will be One America News Network, a right-wing news outlet that is outrageously pro-Trump.

In May, OAN partnered with the United States Agency for Global Media to replace Voice of America, a government-funded broadcaster the Trump administration was recently blocked from shuttering, with its own right-wing newsfeed.

Hegseth claimed in a post on X Monday that the new press policy would prevent the reporters from roaming free, require them to wear badges, and bar them from “solicit[ing] criminal acts.” But reporters were always required to wear badges and never allowed to wander the halls of the Pentagon. Still, the secretary had previously barred the press from certain areas of the building in May.

The Military Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit for journalists covering the military, published an article by military journalist Steve Walsh Monday urging reporters not to sign onto the new policy, calling it an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”

“Secretary Hegseth has not briefed Pentagon reporters in nearly four months, and Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson has not conducted a briefing in two months,” Walsh wrote. “The Defense Department has avoided questions from the press, all while U.S. troops are operating around the globe, the Pentagon has conducted legally questionable military strikes that have killed people in international waters and the administration has deployed troops to American cities.”

Even Fox News joined with ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC to release a statement Tuesday afternoon rejecting the policy, saying it was “without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.”

This story has been updated.

Former FBI Director James Comey scored an early victory this week, as U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff shut down the Justice Department’s proposed restrictions on Comey’s ability to access discovery, the evidence and information the prosecution provides to the defense before trial.

The DOJ had sought to prohibit Comey’s access to discovery when not under the supervision of his attorneys, citing the “sensitive” nature of the records. Comey’s lawyers disagreed, saying this would place the defense “at a severe and unnecessary disadvantage.” After all, they noted, throughout his prosecutorial career through his time at the FBI, Comey was “entrusted with some of the most sensitive and highly guarded information in the country.”

The court sided with Comey on Monday, with Nachmanoff ruling that “the circumstances of this case do not support the government’s proposed limitations on the sharing of ‘Protected Material’ with Defendant or prospective defense witnesses, which would unnecessarily hinder and delay Defendant’s ability to adequately prepare for trial.”

Comey was indicted last month on charges, widely regarded as politically motivated, of false statements to Congress and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. Comey pleaded not guilty, and his legal team is expected to try getting the case dismissed for “vindictive prosecution.” Though such dismissals are rare, Comey seems to have a better-than-average chance, given President Donald Trump has made obvious his animosity toward him.

The Supreme Court has tossed Alex Jones’s efforts for a renewed defamation challenge, denying his request to review and potentially overturn the $1.4 billion judgment against him for making conspiratorial comments that undermined the severity and legitimacy of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.

Jones made his name and living by labeling the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people including 20 children, a “hoax.” His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

“The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions,” Jones told the Supreme Court, in an appeal filed in September.

The families chose not to respond, and they were not ordered by the court to do so.

The Sandy Hook ruling effectively bankrupted Jones, ordering the conspiracist to cough up more than a billion dollars to the victims of the tragedy. However, Jones has managed to hold off on paying out the massive sum by filing for bankruptcy in 2022. So far, he hasn’t paid a single cent.

Last month, it appeared that the Trump administration was willing to go to bat for Jones after the Justice Department pledged to investigate one of the witnesses in Jones’s defamation case, retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, the first responder to arrive at the school. But that case unraveled quickly—just 24 hours after Jones announced the lawsuit, Justice Department officials shut it down.

President Trump was up in the middle of the night posting about how Time Magazine didn’t get his good side.

“Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time. They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!” the president wrote at 1:36 a.m. on Monday in response to the glowing cover Time gave him titled “His Triumph,” which prominently pictures him from a close-up lower angle with the sun shining right behind his head, making his thinning blond hair appear even thinner.

“I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out,” Trump continued. “What are they doing, and why?”

Leave it to Trump to take issue with a glowing cover story about a ceasefire deal that may come to define his term because he doesn’t like the way he looks in it. The picture isn’t even that bad—he always looks like that.

It would be a whole lot easier for the president if Democratic governors just allowed him to send the troops to their cities.

That’s more or less what Donald Trump said while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on his flight back from Egypt, where the country’s authoritarian regime seemed to inspire his approach to handling crime in the United States.

“Do you want to see some U.S. governors be more like Egypt?” asked one reporter.

“No, I want them to be stronger and tougher, and not allow us to have record-breaking crime in Chicago,” Trump said after midnight Tuesday. “I want them to admit they have crime.”

“I want them to say we have a problem, could Trump bring in the troops and solve the problem,” he added.

Trump also offered a direct petition to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, spelling out that he wanted the Prairie State leader to “beg” for the White House’s assistance.

“I think he should beg for help, because he’s running a bad operation,” Trump said.

Ultimately, Trump’s desire to wield the military for his political agenda is startlingly like Egypt, which he showered with praise while celebrating a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine Monday.

Egypt is categorized as “not free” by an analysis from Freedom House, a democracy advocacy organization that formed nearly a century ago to rally the world against the threat of Nazi Germany. Political opposition in Egypt is nearly nonexistent. Civil liberties that are currently taken for granted in the U.S., such as the right to protest and freedom of the press, are choked by the tight fist of the Egyptian government, which has been dominated by the military since a 2013 coup.

Why Trump might admire Egypt’s regime is no secret. Trump has made enemies out of his stateside opposition, publicly calling for the political persecution of Democratic lawmakers who have dared to object to his agenda, including Pritzker, Senator Adam Schiff, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and more.

Just last week, the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a nineteenth-century law that would let him utilize the military for domestic purposes, to quell fictitious bedlam that he has claimed has taken over Democratic cities.

One such area that Trump has homed in on is Portland, Oregon, a city better known for Voodoo Doughnuts and cold brew than hellish riots. Late last month, the president ordered the National Guard to the hipster paradise, but his rationale for sending them was not informed by statistics or data—instead, it was because of something he saw on TV.

Other crime stats that have informed his decision to federalize the law enforcement of American cities were completely imagined. When Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard members to Washington in August, he blamed the city’s rising crime data—from 2023. The cherry-picked statistics misrepresented the state of crime in the nation’s capital, which, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department that was touted by the FBI, had actually fallen last year by 35 percent.

President Donald Trump won’t stop fawning over the White House press secretary in the creepiest way possible.

Speaking to a gaggle of reporters on Air Force One after departing Egypt Tuesday, Trump asked, “How’s Karoline doing? Is she doing good? Should Karoline be replaced?”

As the journalists on board began to lightly protest, Trump cut them off. “It’ll never happen,” he said.

A smile slowly spread across the president’s face as he continued to muse over the questions from the press. “That face, those [inaudible], and those lips. They move like a machine gun, right?” he said.

The president, who has a tendency to repeat comments he considers to be clever, was rehashing a remark he’d made in August during an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty. Speaking about Leavitt, Trump remarked: “She’s become a star. It’s that face. It’s that brain. It’s those lips, the way they move. They move like she’s a machine gun.”

Setting aside that it’s a strangely sexual remark, it feels particularly inappropriate when directed at the 28-year-old Leavitt, the White House’s youngest press secretary to date.

Those outside of Trump’s world know that Leavitt isn’t doing so hot. Since the beginning of the month, she’s struggled to defend Trump’s outlandish claims about Democratic cities, publicly seethed over bad polls, and offered weak excuses for the president’s gleeful efforts to sack essential federal workers.

It’s clear from many of Trump’s remarks about the women around him that the most important thing they have to offer is their appearance—and this extends beyond his (mostly blonde) inner circle. Speaking about Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Monday, the U.S. president called her “a beautiful young woman.”

“Now if you use the word ‘beautiful’ in the United States about a woman, that’s the end of your political career, but I’ll take my chances,” Trump said of Meloni.

In an early taste of CBS News’s editorial direction under its newly anointed editor in chief, the anti-woke pundit Bari Weiss, the storied outlet elevated a hit piece on Zohran Mamdani, the progressive New York City Democratic mayoral nominee.

CBS News on Friday published a segment featuring Olivia Reingold—a reporter for the Weiss-founded Free Press, which is now owned by the same parent company as CBS. Reingold, whose previous work for Weiss includes a much-criticized August story that attempted to downplay the Israel-induced famine in Gaza, shared her reporting on Mamdani on a CBS morning program.

“Some NYPD officers worry about Mamdani becoming the NYC mayor, The Free Press reports,” reads the title of the segment posted on CBSNews.com. (Until Monday, “Mamdani” had been misspelled “Mandani.”)

Reingold reported that officers in the New York Police Department are worried about Mamdani, with some “considering retiring.” The evidence? In total, her Free Press article contains quotes from four of the at least 33,000 uniformed officers serving in the NYPD. None of them are named.

One lieutenant was worked up over whether Mamdani is “going to cut a billion dollars out of our budget” and whether his caseload will “keep piling up while we just get more and more short-staffed.”

Mamdani has proposed reducing the NYPD’s overtime budget and establishing a Department of Community Safety to take on certain nonviolent situations in the city, thereby freeing up the department’s ability to focus on serious crimes.

Another was worried about a possible reduction in the department’s overtime budget. But not all NYPD officers would view reducing overtime negatively; according to The New York Times, many officers have actually quit their jobs because of the significant demands of compulsory overtime.

Another source of Reingold’s was a Republican cop who has been dissatisfied with the department’s direction since the tenure of Bill de Blasio, the city’s Democratic mayor from 2014 to 2021. The other interviewed officer said he plans on staying in the department but is concerned about its waning “culture of brotherhood”—though he did not directly attribute that to Mamdani’s expected election.

All told, the story is thinly sourced, fearmongering, tabloid drek. It elevates the voices of a handful of cops who happen to share The Free Press’s editorial line: hostility toward Mamdani’s election. It’s highly unlikely that CBS News would have published a story like this—one unquestionably elevating questionable reporting from a biased outlet—before Weiss took the reins last week.

Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy thinks that those who attend No Kings protests this weekend are members of antifa.

“The ‘No Kings’ protest, Maria, really frustrating. This is part of antifa, paid protesters, it begs the question who’s funding it,” Duffy told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on Monday. “Democrats wanna wait for a big rally of a No Kings protest when the bottom line is, who’s running the show in the Senate? Chuck Schumer’s not running the show, the No Kings protesters or organizers are running the show. Is AOC threatening a primary against Chuck Schumer, is she running the show?”

He then went on to say that Schumer had surrendered all his power to the No Kings protesters.

Duffy calling the No Kings protests “antifa” is ironic given how tame they have been. They are peppered with veterans, federal employees, and mostly older, liberal white people of the #Resistance ilk. The rally is supported by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the College Democrats of America—not antifa, which doesn’t exist. But it’s clear that the Trump administration has no issue labeling any kind of organic, organized resistance to them as antifa, which they have labeled a terrorist organization.

Duffy’s comments were similar to ones House Speaker Mike Johnson made last week.

“We’re so angry about it. I’m a very patient guy, but I have had it with these people. They’re playing games with real people’s lives,” Johnson ranted last Friday on Fox News, in his usual monotone voice. “The theory we have right now: They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and the antifa people, they’re all coming out. Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event. It’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally, ’cuz they can’t face their rabid base. This is serious business hurting real people.… I’m beyond words.”

Antifa be warned: The Trump administration is coming for you, but first they have to speak with some podcasters.

Conservative podcaster Glenn Beck insisted Monday that the FBI was turning over “every single stone” to locate members of the famously decentralized anti-fascist movement—a fact he became aware of when they allegedly arrived at his door to discuss a recent series he did discussing the supposed antifa network.

“We dove in head first, and we analyzed the Antifa network, and we went from the street thugs to the support groups and eventually to the funding. To say the FBI was interested in this might be an understatement,” Beck said. “It is so clear to me that they are exploring all angles of this and they are talking to anyone and everyone that can give them any kind of information.”

“How do I know? Saturday, I get a phone call,” Beck continued, recalling the conversation.

“‘The director would like to send over some agents to speak to you, Glenn.’ I’m like, ‘The director? FBI agents?’ ‘Yes, you said some things that they need to talk to you about.’”

The fact that Beck might catch FBI Director Kash Patel’s attention should come as no surprise, especially since Patel used to host his own conspiratorial political opinion show before he was tasked to run America’s lead investigative agency.

“They sat in my—three agents—sat in my living room for almost two hours,” Beck said. “It was surreal at one point.”

For years, Donald Trump and his allies have pushed the idea that violent, far-left radicals are wreaking havoc in cities across the country, but their rhetoric has been noticeably devoid of evidence. To quell the noise, members of the House Intelligence Committee asked the CIA and FBI in 2020 to investigate false intelligence campaigns and find proof of the anti-fascist group’s supposed “invasion.” Despite reports contradicting Trump’s rhetoric, the noise did not die down.

Last week, Trump designated antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that anti-fascists fail to commit a fraction of the violence that the far-right extremists they oppose do.

“Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” Trump’s order states.

But Trump’s action flouted the fact that he doesn’t have the authority to designate antifa as a terrorist organization—that power resides with Congress. And critics have warned that this could just be the beginning, as the White House works toward a broader crackdown on political opposition to its immigration agenda, as evidenced by Trump’s decision to send the National Guard to subdue alleged unrest in the hipster paradise of Portland, Oregon, or by the elevation of rhetoric that has lumped fervor against antifa with legitimate political parties, such as the Democratic Socialists of America.