Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran who President-elect Donald Trump picked on Tuesday to be his secretary of defense, wrote the literal book on how woke ideology has conquered the military.
In “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men who Keep us Free,” Hegseth’s fifth book, he wrote about personally witnessing the military go through changes. In fact, he says he was pushed out of the Army because of those changes.
“I joined the Army in 2001 because I wanted to serve my country. Extremists attacked us on 9/11, and we went to war. I became an infantry officer in 2003. I guarded terrorists at Guantánamo Bay in 2004. I led men in combat in Iraq in 2005. I pulled bodies out of burning vehicles in Afghanistan in 2012. I held a riot shield outside the White House in 2020,” he wrote in the introduction.
“And in 2021, I was deemed an ‘extremist’ by that very same Army,” he added, per Fox News. “Yes, you read that right. Twenty years … and the military I loved, I fought for, I revered … spit me out. While writing this book, I separated from an Army that didn’t want me anymore. The feeling was mutual — I didn’t want this Army anymore either.”
“The War on Warriors” was released in early June and quickly rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list with more than 60,000 copies moved in its first week, according to Mediate.
Earlier this year, ahead of the book’s release, Hegseth spoke with Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro about how the military underwent a “fundamental transformation” starting in the Obama administration, shifting away from being an “institution more focused than any other in our government, in our society, on meritocracy, on lethality, on readiness.”
Hearkening back to the run-up to President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Hegseth recalled being ordered as part of the National Guard to defend the event — that is until a commander called and said he was no longer needed. Hegseth said that during the writing of his book, he “spoke to someone who was privy to the decision-making” and this person said the chain of command went through his social media and saw that he had the Jerusalem cross and dubbed it a “white extremist tattoo” and that he was a “threat and an extremist,” leading to the revocation of his orders.
MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+
“So I signed up 20 years ago to fight extremists, put my life on the line, and now I’m deemed one because of what I believe — because of my Christian faith or because I work for Fox News or because I support Donald Trump? Any one of those is a wrong answer. Like, I’ve worn this uniform for the better part of 20 years for this country, and you’re calling me an extremist. If they’ll do that to me, they’ll do it to anybody. And they did,” he said.
Hegseth said that “especially under Obama, the focus became, ‘No, no, no, no, what about these gender issues? What about these trans issues? What about these women in combat issues? What about climate change?’ And certainly under Biden, it’s been, ‘What about extremism?’”
Young soldiers joining the armed forces are bombarded with “woke ideology” during training, he said, adding: “You mentioned the warriors are just as good as they’ve always been. I agree, kind of. The challenge is because it’s a top-down organization, you start pushing things like DEI, now your young lieutenants and your young privates going through basic or going through ROTC or going through West Point are getting that woke ideology as part of their training.”
Hegseth also explained how the death of George Floyd in 2020 led Department of Defense leadership to address a supposed “systematic problem” of racism in the military: “The Left knows that by pushing DEI, now they’ve got black soldiers looking at white soldiers and white soldiers looking at black soldiers wondering who really deserved what or why they’re in a position, which is really toxic for an organization primed on unity.”
