A botched smear of Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth just further exposed the rank partisanship in both the military and the media.
And showed exactly why President-elect Donald Trump needs a reformer like Hegseth running the Pentagon.
On X Wednesday, Hegseth flagged an in-the-works hit piece, saying: “We understand that ProPublica (the Left Wing hack group) is planning to publish a knowingly false report that I was not accepted to West Point in 1999.”
To kibosh any doubt, he included a photo of his acceptance letter from then-West Point Superintendent, Lt.-Gen. Daniel Christman.
ProPublica senior editor Jesse Eisinger answered with telling haughty self-importance: “We asked West Pt public affairs, which told us twice on the record that he hadn’t even applied there. We reached out. Hegseth’s spox gave us his acceptance letter. We didn’t publish a story. That’s journalism.”
He followed with an 11-part thread (concluding. “This is how journalism is supposed to work”!) on the tale, but never explained why the publication started chasing the story in the first place — nor why ProPublica never dug into, say, Tim Walz’s claims.
The reason, of course, is that ProPublica isn’t so much a news outlet as it is a left-wing “opposition research” project, funded by shadowy “anonymous” donors to dig up dirt (some of it possibly true) on Republicans and conservatives.
As witness its smears Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Still a mystery is just how the West Point public affairs team failed so conveniently for ProPublica’s agenda, repeatedly giving false info to an agenda-driven outlet — answers that might’ve violated the Privacy Act even if they’d been true.
A genuine news outlet could’ve turned these events into an exposé on the forces working to tank this nomination.
You have to wonder if some insider (at the school, or higher up the command chain) didn’t suggest ProPublica chase this story.
Certainly, high command is nervous about Hegseth’s and Trump’s stated intentions to fire “woke” generals who’ve risen to the top as politicians-in-uniform.
Hegseth’s lucky he had that 20-year-old letter handy: Absent hard proof to the contrary, ProPublica might well have gone to press with the lie, “apologizing” only when and if it had to.
With the eager cooperation of top Pentagon “career” officials, Democrats for years have pushed political correctness and even mandatory DEI “re education” on our troops.
Putting political partisans in civilian jobs at West Point is even easier.
Heck, the military academy “voluntarily” removed “duty, honor, country” from its mission statement in March.
The longer the Hegseth nomination fight goes on, the more obvious the need for someone like Pete to start cleaning house at the Pentagon.
America needs a military devoted to doing its job, not to catering to the left.
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