by Chuck Fager, Quaker House Board Member
As Pete Hegseth moves through his Senate confirmation hearing process to become the Secretary of Defense, my mind is full of questions.
And the top query in the stack is, obviously:
Why does Hegseth despise—or is it hate— General Charles Q. Brown so much? So intensely?
Obviously?
Yes. Not least because, almost as soon as Hegseth’s nomination surfaced and a podcaster asked what his plans were, Hegseth’s response was blunt:
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said, referring to Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. “Any general, any admiral, whatever,” who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or ‘woke shit’ has “got to go.”
Do that “First of all?”
Yes. Hegseth has emitted the same message more than once. In his latest book, The War on Warriors, he went near berserk about it:
“[T]he American military has reached the lowest level in two decades. Military recruiting numbers have plummeted, across all services—and continue to sink. Army bases I served at—and millions of warriors trained at and deployed from—have been given benign new names like “Fort Liberty.” Our generals are hunting for racists in our ranks that they know do not exist. Meanwhile, affirmative action promotions have skyrocketed, with “firsts” being the most important factor in filling new commanders. We will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything! The Afghanistan failure reverberated worse than anyone expected, with not a single leader responsible held accountable. (page 1)
“Hunting for racism, today’s generals create racial strife…
Rising to the rank of general—or chairman of the Joint Chiefs or secretary of defense—used to mean reaching the pinnacle of the “Profession of Arms.” But not anymore… These men, and women, are cowards hiding under stars. Whores to wokesters… Later, those pathetic generals retire, collect fat pensions, and sit on corporate defense boards. Cowards, then sellouts.” (Page 10)
Whores to wokesters? Pathetic cowards hiding under stars? Sellouts?
Okay, Pete, now tell us what you really think…
Furthermore, show us how Brown fits this description.
Brown was only mentioned in passing near the end of Hegseth’s Senate hearing on January 14: Newbie Senator Alissa Slotkin from Michigan asked Hegseth if Brown would be fired; Hegseth said al generals were to be “reviewed.”
Brown himself is clearly familiar with such “reviews.” Born in San Antonio, Texas, he recalls that
“In the third grade, my sister and I were the only two African-Americans in our entire elementary school. It was the same thing when I came into the Air Force, particularly since I decided to become a pilot. Back then, it was about 2 percent of the pilots were African-American, and that number today is roughly about the same.” (People Magazine, Feb. 11, 2021):
Interracial navigation, particularly in a military setting, was practically bred into Brown. His grandfather served in the Pacific in World War Two. His father had a successful career in the Army, including two tours in Vietnam, retiring as a colonel.
For college, the younger Brown picked Texas Tech, a school ranked, in its own words, “toward the top of the list among schools in Texas and in the Big 12 Conference.” (That is, respected, but hardly elite.) Its largest minority student group was Hispanic.
At Texas Tech he signed up for ROTC at his father’s behest, yet says his initial aim was to be an architect.
Then one day an Air Force ROTC instructor took him up for a spin in a jet trainer—and the experience he says was “like a roller coaster,” and it changed his life. Smitten by flying, in 1984, he graduated, was commissioned in the Air Force, and headed for pilot training.
Flying warplanes is no picnic: Brown spent two years in intensive pilot training, in which he excelled. He won his wings, and was assigned the Air Force’s premier fighter, the F-16. Then and throughout his now forty-year military career, while steadily climbing the ranks, he was always conscious of the rarity of black pilots and senior officers:
Many times I was the only one in my squadron—or in a fighter wing of 72 pilots, there were two of us. That’s been my career, and that’s something I’ve had to deal with, from the time I was in third grade all the way to where I am today.
I vividly remember being in Korea. I had the same flight suit, same set of wings as my fellow white pilots, and I’d get asked, “Are you a pilot?” I can somewhat understand that, because they probably have not seen an African-American pilot. But on the same token, give me the benefit of the doubt because I’m wearing the same uniform, the same wings.
Another example: When you get to senior levels, you have reserved parking spots around the base. I was in civilian clothes, I parked in a spot and someone came out and said, “That slot is reserved for the Pacific Air Force’s Commander.” And I go, “Yeah, I know, because I am the Pacific Air Force’s Commander.”
Being a pilot, though, brought times of relief:
“When I put my helmet on and put that visor down and get in that F-16, you don’t know who I am. You don’t really care. You just want to make sure I’m getting the job done,” Brown said… “And that’s what we believe about bringing people into our service.”
Despite his long record of career success, Brown candidly admits that he has faced a continuing burden as a black officer. In a short video he issued after the murder of George Floyd, he said,
I’m thinking about the pressure I’ve felt to perform error-free especially for supervisors I perceived had expected less from me as an African-American.
I’m thinking about having to represent by working twice as hard to prove their expectations and perceptions of African-Americans were invalid.
“Getting the job done” for an F-16 pilot is not only about climbing a career ladder: bottom line, it’s part of fighting wars. Brown has been deployed to several combat missions, and commanded air units in others. Perhaps the longest and most significant was a major war that’s hardly known to the general American public: it was called Operation Inherent Resolve.
Inherent Resolve was a campaign sandwiched between, and overshadowed by the U. S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its aim was the destruction of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, which appeared in 2014 and soon occupied large sectors of Iraqi and Syrian territory. Inherent Resolve brought together a broad international coalition of nations determined to eradicate the violent upstart “state,” or “Caliphate,” through a combination of ground combat and massive bombing raids.
General Brown commanded much of this lengthy aerial campaign and racked up 130 hours of personal combat flight. By March 2019, all the Isis territory had been reclaimed, the Caliphate reduced to a fugitive band, and ISIS little more than a remnant of scattered, hunted (but still dangerous) terrorists.
The warfighting success of the Inherent Resolve campaign, combined with Brown’s skills at threading the many needles of being Black in the white space of military commanders, put him on the path to being named as Air Force Chief of Staff, and then in 2023 Chair of the Joint Chiefs, which made him the highest-ranking U. S. uniformed officer, and the first African-American to hold either post.
And it is this record of success that Hegseth is determined to crash. In Brown’s forty-year record, I’ve looked in vain for evidence of “woke” incompetence. Today’s F-16s cost up to $80 million apiece; the air Force doesn’t put incompetents at their controls. Among the string of no-win recent U. S. wars, the elimination of the ISIS caliphate stands in sharp contrast.
But his achievements evidently mean little or less than nothing to Pete Hegseth. It appears that what vaulted Brown to the top of Hegseth’s target list was that in June 2020, Brown made a concise, four-minute video statement to his airmen on “What I’m thinking about” after George Floyd’s death.
The statement is calm, direct, measured, and free of inflammatory rhetoric. (Although he does mention “racism.” Once.)
But that was once too many for Hegseth. He seems unable to stop repeating his vehement, livid denials that there is anything to the statements by Brown and others that the military, despite its interracial makeup, still has work to do. From Hegseth’s latest book, The War on Warriors (aka WOW) again:
For the past three years, the Pentagon—across all branches—has embraced the social justice messages of gender equity, racial diversity, climate stupidity, vaccine worship, and the LGBTQA+ alphabet soup in their recruiting pushes. Only one problem: there just aren’t enough trannies from Brooklyn or lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne. Not only do the trannies and lesbians not join, but those very same ads turn off the young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks… (p. 103)
“Our military is, intentionally, going backward.
The core source of the problem lies in the military knuckling under to the personal whims of civilian leaders, yet again. Ask any white or black soldier in formation today—guys who serve together and deployed together—and 99 percent will tell you that racism is not a problem in today’s formations. But we’re being told by activists and politicians outside the military that racism is rampant and must be addressed. As such, our military leaders are hunting for a problem that doesn’t exist. (page 131)
Doesn’t exist? That’s malarkey; but at least Hegseth grudgingly admits that it did exist:
Every time Americans fell in battle, black soldiers sacrificed alongside every other American soldier. But it was over 170 years of sacrifice before Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, finally integrating the United States military. (WOW page 131)
There’s a key clue here, I think: for Hegseth, racism was ended in the military by Truman’s desegregation order, 76 years ago.
Period, he insists, end of story. Brown (and all others), quit your bitching.
To me, there’s no question that Truman’s order was a historic turning point. But it marked a beginning. To insist that it was the end of racism is like saying all school desegregation was over when the Supreme Court issued the Brown decision in 1954. Or that once Jackie Robinson put on a Dodgers uniform in 1947, all racism in major league sports vanished.
Such notions are patent nonsense. Yet they’re not uncommon. And in the world Hegseth grew up in, southeastern Minnesota, they were pervasive.
Hegseth was raised, as he says, “A Baptist boy from the Midwest” (American Crusade, p. 286), in the village of Wanamingo, in Goodhue County. Fertile farm country. Both the village and county (Goodhue) were 98 percent white (and still are). In the 1920s, this region – and much of the rest of Minnesota, was also very fertile ground for an invasive species: the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
Credible membership numbers for the resurgent 1920s Klan in the state are scarce; the Klan claimed 100,000 in 1924, likely an exaggeration; other low estimates are in the range of 30,000, still a substantial cultural-political force. But The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota, a carefully documented 2013 book by researcher Elizabeth Dorsey Hatle, collected dozens of news articles which convincingly show that Klan activity was widespread often intense and public, and long-lasting. And as Hatle concludes,
Klan involvement in Minnesota life and politics occurred throughout the state. There was not a county in Minnesota that wasn’t affected by Klan activities. [NOTE: Hatle notes there was a Klan chapter in Goodhue County itself.] The Minnesota Ku Klux Klan was politically motivated in its actions and its ambitions. The 1920s Klan used the dynamics of right-wing mobilization to keep power at any cost. When the 1920s Ku Klux Klan lost popularity and members toward the end of the decade, Minnesota was one of the last states in the Midwest to give up on the Klan. (Two Klan organizations continued in legal existence until 1997.)
Members of the Minnesota KKK did not physically leave Minnesota after the Klan’s decline, and neither did their mindset.
The persistent Klan “mindset” showed up in other influential political-cultural forces. A stunning example was that of U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen, who died in a mysterious 1940 plane crash not far from Washington DC. As was later documented by NBC News investigative reporting, Lundeen had long been doing secret propaganda work for the Nazi German government. He had also been a prominent political figure among Minnesota Republicans for thirty years.
The main elements of the persistent Klan “mindset” are still quite familiar and active today: hostility to a major “foreign” religion (in the 1920s, Catholicism; today Islam); similar hostility to immigrants, especially non-European, and sexual “deviants”; devotion to white supremacy, an authoritarian form of Protestantism, and to “100% Americanism”; complicity in vigilante violence and intimidation, and political machinations.
Other observers made similar observations long ago: In Indiana, where the 1920s Klan was strongest, an anti-Klan newspaper saw beyond the masks:
“Klanism is a state of mind. A man does not have to belong, wear the regalia & subscribe to the formal teachings, if he has in him the suspicion & hostility emanating from religious and racial bigotry.” (South Bend, Indiana Tribune, March 20, 1923)
Two years later, after the state’s Klan was in decline, George Dale, Editor of the Muncie Indiana Post-Democrat, who had fought the order for years, prophetically editorialized:
“The Klan may be dead as an organization, but the brand of politics inaugurated by [Grand Dragon] D.C. Stephenson goes marching on.”
D.C. Stephenson, by the way, preached the sacredness of marriage and family, but was a sexual predator behind closed curtains. He was convicted of rape and murder in 1925.
Which is another eerie parallel to Pete Hegseth’s baggage.
Although he denied and dodged at his Senate hearing, allegations of abuse of women (brought most vividly by his own mother) are among numerous other serious concerns still hanging over Hegseth’s nomination: abuse of alcohol as well; flagrant, destructive mismanagement of veterans organizations; involvement in theocratic, insurrection-oriented religions; and his own frequent, barely veiled threats of violence against Muslims and many other groups and people he lumps together as “the left.” To him ‘the left” means all those involved with or supportive of such matters as—listed in The War on Warriors—including:
The shoehorning of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), feminism, genderism, safetyism, climate worship, manufactured ‘violent extremism’ [in the ranks], straight up weirdo shit, and a grab bag of social justice causes that infect today’s fighting force… These, combined with “Leftism [which] will enslave us all with big government until it’s enslaved by Islamism…”
All these rantings and threats of civil war deserve close attention, which they did not get in the Senate hearing. The focus here however, has been narrowed to those which touch on the work at Quaker House: the racial exclusion and blatant distortion of the record and views of Hegseth’s principal target in uniform, General Brown, and what these indicate about Hegseth’s plans for the military in our near future, outside and inside this country.
Like the “Klan mindset,” this agenda is likely to be pursued even if Hegseth’s nomination were to fail. Further, that vision becomes near-apocalyptic, particularly if what Hegseth calls the American Crusade (the title of his 2020 book) aimed at all these targets (and more) should be thwarted. If so, in his own words in American Crusade:
“America will decline and die. A national divorce will ensue. Outnumbered freedom lovers will fight back… The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice. It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war…It’s a horrific scenario that nobody wants but would be difficult to avoid.”
With or without Hegseth, is this the crusade the Senate will consent to install in the top leadership at the Pentagon?
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