Pete Hegseth Praises Flyovers After Putting Beachgoers in Danger

In the latest example of his juvenile leadership style, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took to social media Thursday to endorse a military flyover that dipped below the normal flight path, affected spectators below, and triggered an investigation.

During a U.S. Navy Blue Angels military flyover over a beach in Pensacola, Florida, Wednesday morning, a jet “flew too close to the crowd,” reports WSVN, sending sand, tents, chairs, and umbrellas airborne as some beachgoers screamed, covered their ears, and scrambled for cover.

In a statement responding to viral footage of the commotion, the Navy acknowledged that the aircraft “flew lower than standard profiles, resulting in a disturbance on the beach,” and announced a “safety review” of the maneuver.

The incident drew some public concern.

Former Representative Adam Kinzinger, who served in the Air Force, reacted to a video of the maneuver on social media, writing, “This is not safe. I’m all for low passes, seriously but this is too much.” Another observer, a Chicago-based ABC news reporter, called the footage “jarring,” “dangerous,” and “uncharacteristic of the Blue Angels.” Meanwhile, the president’s son Eric Trump condemned “the low-T mainstream media” for reporting on the Navy’s safety review.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth chimed in Thursday with a characteristically puerile response: “The flyovers will continue until morale improves,” he posted on X. He also retweeted two posts in which screenshots of the viral video of the incident were overlayed with the words “CARRY ON PATRIOTS” and “American Empire,” respectively.

As part of his carefully crafted tough-guy image, Hegseth has made a point to express his approval of even questionable military demonstrations.

When several South Carolina Army National Guard helicopter pilots were suspended during a safety review of low-level flyovers in July, Hegseth intervened, posting on X, “We’ll fix this. Carry on, Patriots.” He similarly lifted an investigation and suspension of two Army pilots who performed maneuvers for Kid Rock above the musician’s mansion in the Nashville suburbs.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” on Thursday, as he and diplomats from dozens of countries discussed how to further quash what they see as left-wing terrorism. FBI Director Kash Patel, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar were among those in attendance.

“This is what radical leftism is. They may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalists, or anti-imperialists, Communists, or anarchists, or Marxists,” Rubio said, tapping into the modern McCarthyism that has helped define the second Trump administration. “But the fundamental character is always the same.... It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, liberation—an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built.... Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us.”

Miller highlighted President Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM-7, which targets supposed anti-American activity on the left.

“It directs … all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country,” Miller bragged. “Left-wing political terrorism seeks, as its ultimate end, the overthrow of our system and form of government—and we’ve seen this has taken place as many times, in many places, throughout the years.”

“Left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, and suffering,” he continued. “It only can travel in one direction. There’s no point at which the left-wing terrorist is satisfied with his gains, and ceases progressing.... It always becomes a gulag, it always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms … in order to establish complete and total control.”

Then Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined in on the fun, bringing up that he himself was the target of an assassination attempt by an “addled left-wing activist.”

It’s so interesting to watch these people wield what they see as this infallible moral compass, never once considering that they—and their predecessors—have created many of the conditions which have forced people to resist, whether it be abroad or domestically. Furthermore, this blanket definition of left-wing terrorism is not rooted in reality, it’s to serve their NSPM-7 agenda to crack down on dissidents. Meanwhile, they continue to fully ignore the right-wing terrorism that this administration has not only ignored, but fostered.

The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, Mike Collins, has close ties to a white nationalist influencer: his son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II.

CNN reports that Scheer is registered to vote at a Collins-owned property, has been featured in Collins’s campaign photos, and was at Collins’s victory party after he won the Republican primary in June. Scheer, who is married to Collins’s daughter Summer, shares Nazi and antisemitic material online, including posts from the white nationalist hate group Patriot Front.

Scheer has more than 1.5 million combined followers across Telegram, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and posts mostly about fitness, Christianity, and masculinity, according to CNN. He has also called for Muslims to be deported, and shared an antisemitic infographic that he said his wife made.

On one podcast in November, Scheer said that white people were in danger of going extinct and that restoring the United States as a white country would require “clearing our land of other people.” Also in November, Scheer posted a video to YouTube attacking “Jewish Bolsheviks” and invoking pro-Nazi conspiracies.

“Sixty million Christians that were killed by Jewish Bolsheviks in the early 1900s right before World War II,” Scheer said. “They don’t tell us the history about Germany before World War II. All we’re told is, ‘Germany bad, Hitler evil, don’t ask questions, Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust, here’s 50 movies every year about the Holocaust and why it’s so bad.’”

In a statement to CNN, Collins’s campaign did not address Scheer’s posts or beliefs, instead saying, “Rep. Collins’ lifelong support for Israel is unquestionable and backed by his consistent record in Congress of standing up for Israel and her people.”

Collins’s track record also verges on bigotry, as the congressman has complained about a halal restaurant in the House Rayburn building, harassed a Jewish reporter using antisemitic tropes, cheered on racist protesters in Mississippi in 2024, and blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for train derailments. Maybe Collins has more in common with Scheer than he is willing to admit.

Donald Trump has tasked America’s most elite law enforcement agency with solving the great mystery of why his substandard Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool repair job is already coming undone.

The pool was drained last weekend to remedy what Trump initially described as a 250-foot gash in the “American flag blue” pool liner he had installed. Trump later described the damage as a 300-foot gash, and then escalated the length a third time to a 350-foot gash, which he insists was caused by vandals.

An FBI evidence-gathering team was spotted at the pool Wednesday afternoon, meticulously documenting the pool’s crime-covered floor with laser-scanning and measuring equipment. An FBI spokesperson confirmed the bureau’s presence at the scene to The New York Times, explaining that the FBI was assisting the U.S. Park Police in investigating damage to the pool liner.

Trump originally claimed that renovating the Reflecting Pool would cost $1.8 million, but that hasn’t been the case. Records indicate that the Trump administration spent at least $14.7 million on the first renovation of the Reflecting Pool, and has spent even more in the latest attempt to fix it, bringing the overall tally closer to $16 million.

The money was spent in an apparently futile effort to rid the premises of a relentless algal bloom that returned to the pool shortly after the monument’s reopening. The Trump administration referred to the flourishing flora as “residual algae” that had been laying dormant in the pool’s water supply lines during the renovation. Its return, nonetheless, turned the water acid green.

Meanwhile, the pool liner installed by Rhino Linings, a popular truck-bed coating company, proved uneven and eventually peeled and floated to the pool’s surface. Both problems, according to Trump, were the fault of vandals.

“The slashes were 300 yards long, and the floor of the pool was cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs,” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this week.

The White House has not provided any great evidence for the theory but has raised tensions regarding the Reflecting Pool regardless. By late June, at least seven individuals were arrested for allegedly destroying the pool, including former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn.

Media reports are shedding a bit more light behind the scenes of President Donald Trump’s decision to quickly undo a suspension of Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle stops.

The initial directive was first reported Tuesday, the morning after an ICE agent shot and killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in Maine. That fatal incident came just days after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed in Houston in a similar situation. The command would have halted stops by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division while its agents received additional training.

The next morning, Trump went public with his objections, overturning the change in a Truth Social post. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools,” he wrote, “THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

It remains unclear whether the president was aware of the vehicle-stop suspension before it was issued. Officials at DHS and ICE told The Atlantic it’s “highly unlikely” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin would have moved forward with the change without the White House’s green light. (“Not a chance,” one DHS source told the magazine. “Someone got into the big boss’s ear. Three-ring circus.”)

But a high-ranking administration official claimed that Trump had not known about it, The Atlantic reports, and that Mullin never received the White House’s blessing. According to CNN’s sources, neither Mullin nor Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, made Trump aware of the pause beforehand.

The night after the freeze was first reported, Trump was “livid,” according to Axios, airing grievances about the move to his advisers. CNN reports that the president grew “furious after watching coverage of the temporary change in policy that suggested he was weakening his immigration enforcement.” As one administration official told The Atlantic, the president believed it would “make them all look weak.”

And indeed, criticisms were pouring in from prominent MAGA anti-immigrant extremists, including Steve Bannon and disgraced former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, as well as officials in DHS and ICE—one of whom groused to the conservative Daily Wire, “Numbers are going down, we can’t do sh*t.”

Following Trump’s outburst, Mullin, despite apparently being behind the directive, announced that he was now “on the same page” as the president.