pete hegseth used the same anti-trans slur for the third time in six weeks. it's not a slip anymore. it's his tight five.
via NPR, Deseret News and Stars and Stripes
A comic who tells the same joke in Iowa, then in Texas, then in Virginia is not having a bad night. He is touring.
On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth gave his State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico to about 600 junior officers and noncommissioned officers, Stars and Stripes reports. Partway through, he read out a list of who no longer belongs. As NPR and the Deseret News both transcribed it, it went: no fatties, then the slur for trans people, then "no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors."
We are not printing the word, for the same reason we didn't last week: you know it, and the construction is the story, not the noun.
what hegseth said at quantico
He set it up as a translation. "It's worth saying again so that the fake news understands it," he said, per the Deseret News, adding that "we are no longer the 'woke department' or the 'weak department.'" Then: "Simple translation of that." Then the list.
Earlier, Stars and Stripes reports, he had told the room: "No more silly PowerPoint trainings or drag queen shows," and "No more gender pronouns. No more identity months. Only the warrior ethos." He closed the bit with the line his own department's rapid-response account chose to post: "The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top."
Testosterone testing on top. A sentence written by someone who has never once been on Grindr.
third time, same bit
On Sept. 19 he stood in front of the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets, called the military "colorblind, gender neutral and merit based," and then ran the sentence again with the slur in it. We wrote about that here, along with the near-identical line he used at an Iowa State Fair fundraiser on Aug. 17. Quantico makes three, in six weeks, each time in front of people who report to him or want to.
That is the part worth sitting with. A slur said once in a room of donors is a man's character. The same slur, in the same slot, in a speech to the troops, filmed and posted by the department itself, is policy wearing a punchline. It arrives in a building that has already thrown out its trans service members.
USA Today's version of the quote simply leaves the word out and keeps the beardos. Online, the accounts amplifying it hardest were the ones cheering, typing the list in full with fire emoji. The critics were quieter and, for once, funnier: one called it "a cafeteria insult list." That is about right, except a cafeteria cannot fire you.
