Rachel Marsden: Here’s what Hegseth should have told his gathering of Pentagon brass

Former “Fox and Friends” weekend host turned War Secretary Pete Hegseth, recently had Pentagon brass fly into Quantico from all around the world to serve as bit players so he could act out his George C. Scott as Gen. George S. Patton fever dream.

If Patton had been ordered off the Temu app with free shipping.

His “no fatties” lecture turned it into something that looked less Hollywood and more holly-jolly backyard extravaganza. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth told the room full of America’s top ranked military brass. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look.”

This is the kind of lecture that your dad gives you when you’re eight years old as he watches you scarf down three Big Macs and a chocolate shake from across the table at McDonald’s after gymnastics class. You’d think that Hegseth would have bigger priorities for the Pentagon.

Oh, but wait. He does! “We need you locked in on the M, not the D, the E or the I, not the DEI or the DIE of DIME. By that I mean the M, military, of the instruments of national power,” sounding like the jock back in high school trying his best to parrot something from the class during which he fell asleep and just read the CliffsNotes. “We have entire departments across the government dedicated to diplomatic, informational and economic lines of effort. We do the M. Nobody else does.”

Sounds like he doesn’t really fully understand how that “M” is “done.” These days, it’s increasingly through a combination of artificial intelligence and video gamers turned drone operators with butts in seats that may or may not be fat. But when was the last time anyone cared how many bags of Cheetos were consumed in the process of smoking some target on the other side of the planet?

Meanwhile, Hegseth is busy trying to look like he’s setting the example by behaving like a gym teacher on crack, running around with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, doing pull-ups and pushups in turbo mode alongside “the troops,” as part of a “fitness check” — with hardly a single proper rep in sight.

They would have been better off just doing “girl pushups” rather than what looked like a series of polite nods to the floor.

But Heaven forbid that anything girly be brought into this.

The US army is a place for real men, and there’s no room for all those women in combat, whom you’d think had been banging up the fighter jets trying to parallel park them on aircraft carriers and clipping wingtips because they were checking to see if their lipstick and aviators looked good in the cockpit reflection. Especially if they can’t meet the male “standards,” exemplified by Hegseth and RFK, of jiggling around under the chin-up bar looking like a confused sloth.

And those women may have even been dudes! “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions. … As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that sh*t,” Hegseth said.

Joking aside, Hegseth is right in including climate change with all the sideshow nonsense. Seems that the “war department” has been overly focused in recent years on churning out reports about how they’re going to be a “climate-ready force.” Uh, bring a jacket?

Extending defense interests into the realm of “climate change” often serves as a convenient justification for keeping military budgets inflated. By framing infrastructure projects as essential to national security, governments can allocate far more taxpayer money to defense under the guise of preparedness. In practice, many initiatives with little direct connection to military readiness find their way into defense spending. In Italy, for example, the government classified the construction of a local bridge as a defense-related expense, arguing that it was strategically important for the movement of troops and equipment. While the bridge primarily served civilian purposes, its inclusion in the military budget highlights how infrastructure projects can be repurposed to fit a national security narrative. The same goes for utility-scale American energy projects with civilian-commercial applications, coastal restorations of questionable military function and stormwater system reconstruction.

But did Hegseth explain any of this? Nope. He left it at merely triggering the libs by dismissing the climate change scam without any explanation that could have indicated that his larger target isn’t the fatties or the girlies, but rather the establishment itself.

He could have then segued into a historically significant takedown of the neoconservative interventionism that the Pentagon has come to represent, and how the military would no longer be used for regime change wars that didn’t serve the American people and their security but instead catered to the shadowy economic special interests of a select few.

Hegseth rambled on about how he didn’t want his kid serving alongside the Pudge Patrol and how everyone was expected to show up to gym class — “we’re not talking hot yoga and stretching, real hard PT,” boasted the one-inch wonder at the pull-up bar.

Hegseth’s battle cry, like his gym session, is a masterpiece of squandered potential. If only the substance could be brought up to the level of the theatrics.

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Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. rachelmarsden.com.