A confederacy of dunces

After purging the DoD leadership ranks of women and Black people, defense secretary Pete Hegseth accidentally texted a journalist the details of his plans to bomb Yemen.

“Under the previous administration, we looked like fools,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a gaggle of reporters in the Oval Office three days ago, referring to a new fighter jet contract with Boeing. “Not anymore!”

That press conference, we learned from truly unbelievable new reporting today, took place roughly a week after Hegseth had accidentally texted the details of his war plans to the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who was included on a Signal group chat about bombing Yemen with the nation’s top national security leaders.

Here’s the lede of that piece by Jeffrey Goldberg, which describes one of the most comically embarrassing and terrifying fuck-ups in the history of the U.S. Defense Department:

Among the many unhinged failures laid out (and backed up with screenshots) in the story, Hegseth texts the group—including, once again for emphasis, the literal editor of The Atlantic by mistake—"I will do all I can to enforce 100% OPSEC.” OPSEC, for those unaware, stands for Operations Security, which is a process that “identifies and protects critical information from adversaries to prevent them from gaining an advantage.” Safe to say we’re not doing that, as NYT’s Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Bluesky.

The scope of this fuck-up is actually so large, according to a few defense scandal historians, that we would already be seeing a litany of resignations across the top echelons of the administration if these were remotely usual times.

But these are not normal times. The “flood the zone” strategy, which has already thwarted the media from being able to cover this administration with any sufficient amount of scrutiny, is surely going to do a similar amount of work here to shield most if not all of these men from consequences. I’ll note here that when Trump was asked about the security breach this afternoon, several hours after the story broke, he said he had no idea what was going on—which may very well be true. "I don't know anything about it,” he told reporters. “I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me it's a magazine that's going out of business. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?"

We may have a little while to wait before we learn how Trump is actually going to respond to being humiliated in the very first quarter of his administration by the alcoholic and accused rapist whose Senate confirmation he and Elon jammed through via death threats and primary threats to Republican members who were on the fence about Hegseth. In the meantime, I’d just like to highlight some of Hegseth’s flagship anti-DEI efforts at the Department of Defense, which he claims are meant to prioritize merit and excellence over gender, skin color, and sexuality:

• Fired Air Force General CQ Brown Jr., a decorated Black veteran with over 40 years of service to the country, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replaced him with a lower ranking white guy

• Fired Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan, a four-star admiral and the first woman to lead a branch of the military, and evicted her from her home with three hours notice

• Is trying to ban trans volunteers and service members in the military, claiming that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service”

• Erased legendary WWII vet and civil rights hero Medgar Evers from the Arlington National Cemetery website

• Scrubbed stories about Jackie Robinson, the Navajo Code Talkers, Golden Girls actress Bea Arthur, and Ira Hayes, one of six Marines who raised the American flag at Iwo Jima, from the DoD website

Hegseth, who has a white supremacist tattoo on his bicep, openly believes that white, straight men are inherently superior to the rest of their peers in terms of military readiness and general leadership skills. And for this reason, I personally find an incredible amount of poetic justice and catharsis in the fact that he couldn’t make it two months at the helm of the government’s largest department before face-planting in an historically spectacular way and proving himself, perhaps the straightest, whitest man of them all, absolutely incompetent at this job. For the love of god, please give us back our far more capable “DEI hires” before this disaster of a man kills us all.