You Cannot Be Serious

“You are not serious people.” One of the greatest lines from Succession could easily be applied to Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Pentagon. But here’s the rub. America’s most unserious people are systematically sidelining its most serious assets. One such example from the NYT (Gift Article): Hegseth Closes Pentagon Office Focused on Future Wars. It’s called the Office of Net Assessment and it’s populated by some of the best and smartest people in the country working on plans to protect us and our children from worst case scenarios. Many of them have turned down seven figure salaries in the private sector out of a sense of sacrifice and duty. Like so many of the public servants being reassigned or canned willy-nilly by those often ignorant of what they even do, they deserve our admiration, not the politically-motivated wrath of unserious people.

+ How unserious? “Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website, part of a broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from its online presence.” You can delete information from websites, but you can’t delete the real threats facing the country. And I’m dead serious when I say we’re a little less safe today.