Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees have produced howls of outrage, not only from the left, but also from many denizens of the D.C. establishment — but I repeat myself. Some, such as Rep. Matt Gaetz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seem like a middle finger waved in the face of the “swamp,” which may well have been intentional.
Others, however, no matter how anodyne they may seem, have also aroused the ire of the usual suspects. That Gov. Doug Burgum or CEO Chris Wright have prompted peals of anguish says more about the entitled progressives than about their qualifications for office.
Still, no one seems to have attracted such sustained ire as Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. He’s too young, the critics say, and as a mere National Guard major, he lacks the requisite stature to command generals and admirals. Despite degrees from Princeton and Harvard Universities, earned back in the day when such accomplishments still meant something, he lacks the appropriate educational heft. And, for too many left-wing pundits, the views he’s expressed in several books and frequently on Fox News suggest that, well, he just isn’t bright enough for the job.
One might observe that, on balance, Hegseth is more qualified for leadership than Barack Obama when the latter entered the Senate, much less when he was elected president. Unsurprisingly, the left has no patience with such comparisons.
I suspect, however, that these “progressive” pundits are even more angered by Hegseth’s strongly expressed support for Israel’s right to exist and his concomitant hostility to the Iranian regime. These, after all, are positions sharply at odds with the disdain for Israel that has animated both the Biden and Obama administrations, much less the outright hatred that now courses through the veins of the left on college campuses and in the streets.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, we’ve witnessed how this has played out, with violent anti-Israel demonstrations centered on college campuses here and across Western Europe. These trailed off over the summer, one suspects because the camp followers went home to party, while the hardcore activists decided that they needed to tone it down to help Biden (and then Harris) get re-elected. But it never went away, and now, when they can no longer hurt the Democrats’ electoral prospects, one suspects that the demonstrations will pick up once again. And I suspect that Hegseth will quickly become a target, in much the same manner as conservative Supreme Court justices.
In Europe, however, anti-Semitic violence has continued at a high level (and let’s not pretend that “anti-Zionism” is anything other than hatred for Jews). Recently it peaked in Amsterdam when anti-Semitic mobs coursed across the city in a well-organized and obviously carefully planned hunt for Jews attending an international soccer match. (READ MORE: ‘Pogrom’ in Amsterdam)
Despite media protestation to the contrary, this was neither incidental soccer hooliganism, nor was it provoked by the actions of Jewish fans. This, simply, was a pogrom, as viciously conceived and brutally executed as those of the Nazis — and very pointedly coinciding with the anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazi stormtroopers and gangs of Nazi students (yes, the universities then were poisoned with Jew-hatred) raged across German cities, destroying Jewish businesses, and beating every Jew they found on the street.
The Amsterdam pogrom, sadly, offers the latest example of the progressive establishment’s unwillingness to forthrightly condemn Islamist radicalism and to insist on drawing a hard line against the Iranian mullahs who promote it across the West. But we’re told that this is impossible, that such condemnation risks promoting “Islamophobia.” This, of course, remains a kind of cultural “third rail” — touch it and die.
This brings me to Sam Hanna, the ex-Navy SEAL fictional character portrayed by LL Cool J on NCIS: Los Angeles and, with the demise of that show, more recently on the egregious NCIS: Hawai’i. My wife and I once enjoyed the various NCIS shows, even though, as a veteran of military law enforcement, she frequently found the premises laughably inaccurate.
But the characters were fun, none more so than the character Hetty Lange on NCIS: Los Angeles, a compellingly larger-than-life creation. But Hetty went away, and the plots became more stale, largely because the “who” of the “whodunit” became irksomely predictable — the villain always turned out to be the white guy, particularly the white guy associated in some way with big business or conservative politics.
Gradually, only Russian oligarchs, intelligence goons, or mafia types were acceptable villains. This, after all, was the time when the left embraced the notion that the 2016 election of Donald Trump had been some kind of Russian conspiracy. The one category that could not be treated as hostile actors — at least storyline villains — were adherents of Islam.
This posed a problem for a show concerned with terrorist plotlines in the years after 9/11. So, whenever it seemed necessary to locate a story in, say, Afghanistan, Sam Hanna would, with clockwork predictability, deliver a lecture reminding viewers that most Muslims were peaceful and that the bad actors were entirely unrepresentative of the “religion of peace.” This was Hollywood at its absolute worst, setting boundaries for allowable thought, boundaries untethered by reality.
Pete Hegseth, it appears, understands only too well the realities of the world we live in, and the threats against which a Department of Defense must be prepared to defend. In an earlier article for The American Spectator, I wrote that we are at war with Iran’s mullahs, not because we chose to go to war with them, but because they chose to go to war with us. In yet another article, I wrote after Oct. 7 that Israel played the role of the “canary in the coal mine” for all of the West, and most notably for the U.S. In the oft-repeated Iranian propaganda phrase, Israel is the “little Satan,” but we are the “great Satan.”
It speaks volumes for the values of the incoming Trump administration that stalwarts like Peter Hegseth will be joined by former Gov. Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.N. Ambassador, and Rep. Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor. Ironically, the best chance for peace in the Middle East follows from sending the clear message to the mullahs that we will no longer indulge their “from the river to the sea” shenanigans. We don’t need Hollywoke values in our Middle East policy, or indeed anywhere else in the world. We don’t need “Sam Hanna” values in a Secretary of Defense.
We don’t need a military that trades combat readiness for DEI training. We do need someone who recognizes that, like it or not, there are hostile actors bent on doing us harm. We don’t need to indulge in crusades to remake the world, but we need to be prepared to defend ourselves, and that very much includes a strong stance in support of Israel and against the threat from Iran. We need this far more than “management experience” or conversance with Obama-era pieties about “leading from behind.”
We might just need someone like Pete Hegseth.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counterterrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A sequel is forthcoming. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions and on Kindle Unlimited.
READ MORE from James McGee:
Trump’s Election Sends the Swamp a Message
Peanut the Squirrel and the Coercive State
Hurricane Outrage: Where is Harris?
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