Pete Hegseth speaks during a Senate Armed Services committee hearing on his expected nomination to be Secretary of Defense on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
New York Times opinion writer David Brooks recently detailed how the confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host and Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, made him “sick to his stomach.”
Brooks opened by discussing the important questions senators would be expected to ask someone applying to lead the U.S. military, like how AI and drones will affect wars and how to shift our defense strategy to focus on nation-state warfare over counterterrorism.
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“If you’re a Democrat trying to sink a nomination, you would think you’d want to ask substantive questions on life-or-death issues like these in order to expose the nominee’s ignorance and unpreparedness,” Brooks wrote, adding that “if you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearing, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.”
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He went on to say we currently live in a “soap opera” country, where the main goal is to rile up voters and go viral rather than try to communicate actual information about policy. As Brooks put it, “You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing — by striking a pose.”
Hegseth, he said, is “the living, breathing embodiment of this culture.”
“The world is on fire and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the military.”
He criticized Democrats, too, for focusing on Hegseth’s views about women in combat. “Like everybody in my social class, I support women in combat,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s as important an issue as failure to deter World War III.”
He slammed Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who he has “enormous respect for,” because her questions were focused on issues like LGBTQ+ rights, veterans benefits, allegations of sexual assault against Hegseth, and Hegseth’s alleged drinking problems. “She didn’t show much interest in topics like how to deter and fight a war — which are kind of central to the purview of this committee,” Brooks said.
He praised certain Democratic senators for their lines of questioning, but said Republicans overall “were the more serious party at the hearing.”
“I finished watching the hearing sick to my stomach,” he added, saying he came away thinking there needs to be a better way to think about expertise.
“Hegseth’s core populist conviction — repeated ad nauseam — is that the grunts on the ground know what they are doing and the pencil-necked geeks in air-conditioned offices just write nonsense regulations that get in the way… We don’t want to live in a populist paradise in which expertise is suspect and ignorance a sign of virtue. Nor do we want to live in an elitist world in which technocrats try to rule the world.”
For a healthy democracy, there must be a balance, he said, but so much of what this country needs “has been corrupted by the war for short attention spans.”
For now, Brooks has made it very clear what he thinks based on the title of his op-ed: “We Deserve Pete Hegseth.”
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