{"id":221,"date":"2026-06-17T11:05:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T11:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=221"},"modified":"2026-06-17T11:05:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T11:05:40","slug":"the-dumbest-way-pete-hegseth-is-draining-the-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=221","title":{"rendered":"The Dumbest Way Pete Hegseth Is Draining the Military"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For the past few months, the Atlantic\u2019s Clint Smith has been trying to understand what it\u2019s like for Black service members to report to a secretary of defense like Pete Hegseth.<\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court Will Decide Whether ICE Can Hold People Indefinitely. We Should All Be Worried.<\/a><\/p>\n

Hegseth has called \u201cOur diversity is our strength\u201d the \u201csingle dumbest phrase in military history.\u201d He has declared Black History Month \u201cdead.\u201d And within days of taking charge at the Department of Defense in January 2025, he fired the military\u2019s highest-ranking Black officer, Gen. Charles Q. Brown.<\/p>\n

A little more than a year later, more Black officers have been let go\u2014or simply walked off the job. Then there are the promotions Hegseth has personally blocked, many of them of minorities and women.<\/p>\n

The military was one of the first integrated environments in the U.S., and Smith worries about its future. \u201cDecimating the officer infrastructure, these folks who have been in the military for a long time, who often serve as mentors to many of the younger service members, it\u2019s going to have a profound impact on the long-term landscape of what the military looks like,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Smith about how Hegseth is making the U.S. military a worse career option in symbolic and material ways. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.<\/p>\n

Mary Harris: It seems like so many of the people you\u2019ve spoken to are struggling with this question: \u201cDo I stay or do I go?\u201d And everyone had a different answer. A lot had contradictory answers, saying: \u201cIf we leave, there won\u2019t be anyone left. Nevertheless, I\u2019m leaving.\u201d And you pressed on that with people. What was that conversation like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Clint Smith:<\/strong> People have been struggling with this in a profound way. It\u2019s a sort of existential crisis people are having. They recognize that if every single Black person leaves the military, there will be nobody left. We are already in a moment when they conceive of military leadership attempting to reconstitute Jim Crow within the military, and if the number of people in the military drops in such a precipitous way, it is going to be incredibly difficult, even under the best of circumstances, to build that back. So there\u2019s a recognition of that fact. But at the same time, there is this feeling of: How much can you subject yourself to without it pushing you over the edge? How much can you allow yourself to be complicit in?<\/p>\n

I spoke to a lot of these folks in the midst of what was happening in Minnesota, when it was unclear if the president was going to deploy troops to U.S. cities to fight against protesters and activists in the streets. These are folks who are like, \u201cI come from a civil rights tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

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