Pete Hegseth

I mean, there's a reason people don't want to serve because they don't trust that their senior leaders are going to have their best interest in mind in combat.

I know there were mistakes made on our tours all over the place, but I at least, for the most part, had a sense that my senior leaders were committed to

to the completion of the mission for the right reasons.

And maybe there were strategic differences and all that other stuff, and it wasn't always perfect, and that trust is broken, and you have to reestablish that trust by putting in no-nonsense war fighters in those positions who aren't gonna cater to the socially correct garbage.

I think right now it's a top... My assessment based on talking to... I mean, is that it's a top-down, bottom-up problem.

Is that you've got top-down political generals who've gained rank by playing by all the wrong rules that cater to the ideologues in Washington, D.C.

And so they'll do any social justice, gender, climate, extremism crap because it gets them checked to the next level and gets them closer to the political appointees who...

don't know anything about the military, really, other than they want a new first here and a new first there, and can we get the first trans this or whatever, just nonsense.

And then now you have a junior corps, which, listen, their incentive structure, whether it was in university or at service academies or just coming through college, is belief in these things.

that diversity is our strength, that equity, that the standards could be racially biased, that showing up on time is a social construct.

So if you spend enough time with those two things meeting, you could have a wholesale takeover of the Defense Department.

I do think there's still a core of mostly silent,

You know, they also pushed out a lot of vaccine folks because of the vaccine, obviously.

That's another one.

That's a purge of people of conscience.

If you have enough of a conscience, whether it's faith, belief, or whatever, purge out.

Patriot extremism, purge out.

So there was a big push of a lot of those people in the middle out.

I still think, and...

I know enough guys and talked to enough who said, hey, I want to be in for the right reasons.