Canada Mocks America as Hegseth Fat-Shames Youth Cadet Instructor

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken it upon himself to insult Canadian teenagers and their instructors. Canada is laughing in his face.

On Monday night, Hegseth reposted an image from Vernon Cadet Training Center in British Columbia of an officer in the Cadet Instructors Cadre presenting a young cadet with a medal at the end of a summer cadet training session. The defense secretary captioned the image with a Canadian flag emoji and, in parentheses, “(this is real).”

The Canadian Cadet Program is a federally funded youth development program for Canadians between the ages of 12 and 18 focused on leadership, citizenship, and community service. They are not members of the military.

Hegseth’s post was immediately condemned online, as commenters accused the secretary of body-shaming the instructor and young cadet. Fred Wellman, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Missouri’s 2nd district, wrote, “You’re mocking kids. This is a junior cadet program. What a pathetic small man you are.” Amy Coplan, a California State University Fullerton philosophy professor, added, “Is bullying Canadian teenagers more important than attending to our ever-deteriorating situation in Iran?”

Some responses to Hegseth’s post used the defense secretary’s own style against him, writing “(this is real)” with the American flag alongside images of President Trump with Jeffery Epstein and Hegseth himself soaked in champagne.

Perhaps the greatest insult came from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney himself, who said Tuesday that the post was “beneath their office.”

“When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having the discussions, we can have those discussions,” Carney told reporters. “It’s not constructive, but that’s their democracy.”

Despite the defense secretary’s blatant body-shaming, the Pentagon stands by his every word. “The X post speaks for itself,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Jacob Bliss said.

The whole exchange marks yet another escalation in the Trump administration’s ongoing feud with Canada, during which Trump has levied a trade war against our northern neighbors, thrown insults across the border, posted ridiculous memes, and changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

Donald Trump has decided to take another sledgehammer to the White House—this time on the taxpayer’s dime.

The General Services Administration, under the White House’s guidance, has awarded government contracts to renovate the two-lane Harry S. Truman Bowling Alley in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Politico reported Monday. On July 28, the GSA awarded nearly $253,000 to Charles Mann Enterprises to do some lighting work in the exclusive recreational spot. Weeks later, on August 18, the agency awarded the contractor another $8,800 for escort services to shuttle workers in and out of sensitive government areas.

Somehow, the development has not rattled budget-conscious Republicans in the slightest, despite the party’s previous aversion to the site’s renovation.

The last major renovation project proposed for the bowling alley was announced under President Barack Obama in 2014. At the time, the GSA told Time magazine that the lanes needed a rebuild as they were “irreparable.”

Hours after the article’s publication, the proposed renovation turned into a Washington brouhaha. Republican opposition to the remodel forced the GSA to cancel the project, and the Republican-controlled House went so far as to adopt an amendment prohibiting funding from being used to renovate the bowling alley.

Former Representative Pat Meehan called the renovation a “want,” not a “need.” Former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus made a similar mockery of the proposed rebuild on Twitter, publishing a list of crossed-out governmental funding needs such as the economy and “securing the border.”

“Repair WH Bowling Alley✓,” Priebus wrote at the time.

But Republicans in Trump’s second term are comparatively nonplussed by the MAGA leader’s inordinate and unnecessary spending. Beyond the bowling alley job, Trump has razed the White House East Wing, started construction on a $600 million ballroom (the price of which keeps growing), gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transformed the Palm Room from a lush green foyer into a sterile lobby, and mowed down Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s famous Rose Garden in order to pave “paradise.”

The administration has also spent more than $16 million on an unsuccessful and rushed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, announced plans for a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery (estimated at more than $100 million), indiscriminately axed trees in the Washington area, and destroyed the Kennedy Center facade. It is also reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant, stepped into traffic in Springfield, Ohio, Monday and was killed. His family believes it was a suicide after he lost his Temporary Protected Status.

Ohio State Highway Patrol officials reported that Bel had pulled his car over on the right shoulder of I-70 Monday morning and then walked directly into oncoming traffic. He was struck by a large tractor-trailer and died from his injuries at the scene.

Bel had reportedly been distraught after he, like dozens of Haitians in Springfield, was called to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to be fitted with an ankle monitor following the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Springfield is home to a Haitian community of about 15,000, and a June Supreme Court decision permitted the Trump administration to cancel their TPS protections, despite the ongoing violence and insecurity in Haiti. Without TPS, Haitian residents have been ordered to wear ankle monitors and travel no further than 75 miles from their homes.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” Bel wrote on Instagram on July 30. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

Bel was a recent honors high school graduate and a proud cadet in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He had just started classes as a freshman at Wright State University, where he wanted to study medicine and play soccer.

After being fitted with the ankle monitor, he was reportedly not given a JROTC uniform and could no longer comfortably play soccer.

“In his last days, I did not recognize him as he was such an energetic kid who loves life, friends and family, and education,” the 20-year-old’s father, Pierre Ronal Bel, told The Haitian Times. “It was his first week of classes, but he didn’t feel like he was learning because he was traumatized, so it’s because of ICE’s ankle monitor.… He would wear long pants or jeans whenever he went out so people wouldn’t make fun of him or look at him differently.”

“He felt like he was treated like an animal,” the grieving father added in a statement to The Washington Post.

Bel’s death has shocked and traumatized the Haitian community in Springfield and beyond. This is the same Haitian enclave that President Trump accused of eating cats and dogs on the campaign trail in 2024, and the community has been living in terror ever since the administration canceled TPS. Bel was scheduled for an asylum hearing in October, and reportedly did not want to return to Haiti due to the violence that caused his parents to flee in 2021.

“I’m supposed to be forgiving,” the Bel family’s pastor in Springfield, Carl Ruby, told the Post. “But right now as I sit with a broken family, I’m crying out to God for righteous judgment in those who made this happen.”

Former Customs and Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino—who oversaw some of the Trump administration’s most violent immigration actions—was under internal investigation for allegedly lying about misconduct and antisemitic remarks when he retired back in March.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Bovino’s investigation was triggered by Judge Sarah Ellis, who last year called him out for lying on the stand about being hit in the head with a rock by protesters, which he used to justify his brutal use of tear gas against American citizens.

“I find the defendant’s evidence simply not credible,” Ellis said at the time. “Agents pushed, shoved, tackled protesters, pointed guns at them, threw tear gas and deployed smoke canisters. Everyone that agents detained [was] released by the FBI, and none of them are currently charged with assault.”

An internal federal investigator asked Bovino to answer questions about Ellis’s ruling in March just weeks before he retired. In that same inquiry, Bovino was also asked to respond to allegations that he used antisemitic language on a conference call in January. When Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, an Orthodox Jew, couldn’t make the call due to the Sabbath, a frustrated Bovino allegedly said “Do Orthodox criminals also take off on Saturday?” and used the term “chosen people” in a negative connotation.

Bovino’s tenure as CBP head was absolutely horrific. He tear-gassed men, women, and children. He called Latino immigrants “scum,” “filth,” and “trash,” while identifying as Native American (he is Italian American). Most notably, he claimed that Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, had intended to harm the CBP officers who shot him 10 times while he was pinned to the ground with his gun holstered. Since his exit, Bovino has accused the Trump administration of wanting him killed, and Trump himself of betraying his mass immigration goals.

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss was reportedly responsible for a blatantly racist news headline that tied Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to the 9/11 terrorist attack.

The CBS article was headlined: “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

The story’s lede was even more offensive, grammatically suggesting that El-Sayed was somehow to blame for 9/11.

“As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack,” the story began.

That same language was mirrored in an X post from the company’s official account.

The story critiqued several of El-Sayed’s since-deleted Covid-era tweets in which the former public health official compared the pandemic’s early death toll to the infamous terrorist attack and wrote that he hoped the ensuing government response would “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty.” (This was not controversial—many leaders and media outlets at the time compared Covid’s death toll to that of September 11.)

Ultimately, CBS News used the anniversary of 9/11 to damage the Muslim progressive’s chances in Michigan, even though the content of his posts was rather banal.

The Weiss-led network also suggested there was something sinister about the fact that El-Sayed had deleted the posts, even though his campaign has been public about the fact that he had deleted all his posts prior to 2023.

Status’s Oliver Darcy reported Tuesday that Weiss “personally directed” the Islamophobic language and was a driving force in shaping the story’s framing. According to Status, Weiss “praised” the story during CBS News’s daily editorial meeting, and signaled her support of the piece “to the entire network.” She also urged that the “headline be tweaked to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted tweets referencing the September 11 terrorist attacks,” according to CBS staffers who spoke with Status.

Senior CBS News staff brought the story to the standards department, though little was done about it due to Weiss’s personal involvement.

“They took a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up,” one CBS News employee told Status.

A former senior CBS News staffer who heard about the situation from a former colleague told Status that the article was “shameful” and “the racism is overt.”

A person familiar with the story refuted that there was anything “racist or Islamophobic” about reporting on El-Sayed’s deleted tweets.

They told The New Republic in a message that Weiss “strengthened” the headline, which they said originally read: “For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks.”

They noted that Weiss was not “intimately involved in the reporting process” but confirmed that she did edit the headline and complimented the story during the company’s morning meeting on Monday.

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped to run CBS News late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast news, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Weiss’s business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and singlehandedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place in America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting and was the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalistic ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens to Anderson Cooper, to the company’s de facto face, Scott Pelley.

This story has been updated.