On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth convened hundreds of the U.S. military’s junior officers and enlisted service members in a cavernous auditorium on a military base in Virginia to hear what he called the first of a new annual tradition—a “State of the Force” report to the troops from their self-styled “Secretary of War.” The key moment came when Hegseth, strutting across an American flag-swathed stage in one of his trademark too-tight TV-man’s suits, announced victory over the enemies whose defeat has been the signature focus of his tenure. “We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department,” he declared. “Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos. No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
Listening to the address, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a live-action rerun of one of Hegseth’s old Fox News shows, complete with the vilification of bad guys you didn’t even really know were a problem. (Since when was the U.S. military ever the home of wimps and radicals?) But if the antagonists were a bit opaque, the message came through clearly: the only war that this secretary wants to prosecute is the one at home—against the forces of political correctness, against the military’s own generals, some ten per cent of whom Hegseth has already fired, with plans to dismiss ten per cent more, and, above all, against the “fake news,” which he accused of “treason” for accurately reporting the challenges imposed on U.S. forces by an actual war in the Middle East that went all but unmentioned in his nearly hourlong speech. | 
