Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address last week just about said it all when it comes to MAGA macho paranoia. He proclaimed he had transformed the military through his policies of “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.” What Hegseth wants, of course, is a child’s version of a macho American soldier, the idealized cowboy of the American west, fighting Indians on the frontier to make it safe for western civilization—an army fighting for its Manifest Destiny. Hey, Mr. Secretary, don’t you think it’s time to grow up? One of this humble spirit’s buddies at West Point in the years right before the Civil War was a cadet by the name of George Armstrong Custer, a dude who suffered from the same mentality and met an untimely end, along with his entire cavalry division, at the Battle of Little Big Horn.
“The ideological clowns are out,” Hegseth said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.” Doesn’t he realize he’s one of the most ridiculous ideological clowns in an administration filled with unserious, incompetent sycophants? Doesn’t he realize that by invoking the image of “patriotic cowboys” he’s mocking himself? Apparently not, because in the next breath he likened his idiotic, machismo-obsessed testosterone testing to an ice-cream sundae with a cherry on top.
Hegseth also took the opportunity to attack “anti-American losers in our media” for supposedly aiding the enemy through their reporting on the war with Iran. “It’s treason, actually,” he said. “I hate to have to say it, but it has to be said.” This, of course, fits nicely with President Trump’s most recent attack on freedom of the press, in which anyone who disagrees with him—which recent polls show is the vast majority of the country—is labeled anti-American and an enemy of everything MAGA world holds dear, surely including “patriotic cowboys.”
Like Most of the Trump Administration, Hegseth is Fighting a War with Reality and Losing!
According to MAGAs like Hegseth, the patriotic American cowboy is at risk of emasculation just about everywhere. In Texas, for example, Republicans are running a sick, AI-generated ad depicting Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about “girls with mustaches.” (If you run out of ways to stoke fear of emasculating boys, then heck, focus on masculinizing girls!) Meanwhile in Iowa, an ad accuses Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” As former Representative Matt Gaetz said on X: “I hate the war too, but the Democrats want to trans your kids.” Come on, Matt, do you really think the Democrats want to perform sex-change operations on the nation’s children? This is just stoking paranoia that the American cowboy is at risk of being emasculated, a silly throwback to the “bodily fluids” panic of the McCarthy-era 1950s. And do they really think this ridiculous BS is going to make people forget about the cost of living?
Then there’s a peculiarly updated version of Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Daisy” ad that focused on the threat of nuclear war. The spot opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals, just like the Johnson ad. But then the scene changes, and the girl is in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask while an AI-generated image of James Talarico in scrubs hovers over her. “Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries,” the narrator says ominously. “This November, stop them before it’s too late.”