It’s almost as if Pete Hegseth read my post “America and communism” in November and decided to prove I’m right. Seriously. Is there any other way to explain how he claimed, as reported by CNN on 12 December 2025 (when I initially started to write this piece), that “policies allowing gay people to serve openly in the US military [are] part of a ‘Marxist’ agenda to prioritize social justice over combat readiness.” I mean … wow!
Look, I couldn’t give a flying fandango (from a professional point of view) who someone decides to have sex with, as long as they show up for their job and do it well. And, as I admitted in the “America and communism” post, I’m not intimately familiar with all of the writings of Karl Marx — on whose writings Marxism is based, in case that’s not obvious — but I have access to things called “search engines”. So I searched for “marxism homosexuality” and I was led to a number of articles. (You will be too, if you follow that link.) One of them was a “Washington Post” article entitled “Communist states have sometimes been havens for LGBTQ rights” where the author (Samuel Huneke) states:
Sexuality was not a preoccupation of communism’s earliest theorists. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who penned “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848, had little to say on the topic. What they did was contemptuous.
I suppose it’s possible that Marxist thinkers since Marx and Engels have modified Marxist thought since the mid-1800s, so I shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Hegseth, but what evidence do I have that Hegseth even knows who Karl Marx is, never mind that he knows anything about Marxist thought?! None, that’s how much.
And further opportunity to evaluate Hegseth’s thought process, and the thought process of trump and his transition team, comes in the CNN article:
In a comment to CNN, a Trump transition spokesperson declined to say what specific policies Hegseth might pursue as secretary of defense, including whether he would reinstate “don’t ask, don’t tell” or implement changes to current standards.
Of course not. It’s not as if taking over the leadership of the US Department of Defence requires much forethought and planning. That’s for amateurs.
Like President Trump, Pete wants to see the U.S. military focus on being the world’s strongest fighting force – not on cultural and social issues. Bottom line: If you can meet the standards, you can serve,” the spokesperson said. “But given the threats we face, our priorities shouldn’t be lowering standards and wasting taxpayer money to meet arbitrary social quotas – our priorities should be readiness and lethality.
Right, one’s readiness should be compromised by changing everything the previous administration changed to change the previous administration’s changes. Wha…?
The policy [the ban on transgender individuals serving openly in the military] was reversed under Trump, with then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis implementing a 2018 policy barring those diagnosed with gender dysphoria from serving, except in limited cases. President Joe Biden repealed the Trump-era ban in 2021.
Again, it’s time for musical policies. The music is playing, now everybody switch policies!
Speaking on “the Ben Shapiro Show” in June, Hegseth criticized a military ad campaign featuring a soldier with two lesbian mothers, calling it emblematic of a larger shift toward individualism in military culture.
Yes, we don’t want to encourage individualism in American culture, it just doesn’t exist out in the wild. Hey, I do get that individualism within the military is not necessarily desirable — unless, of course, it’s some individual carrying out some heroic act like storming a machine gun nest — but I suspect that the “military ad campaign featuring a soldier with two lesbian mothers” was for recruiting purposes, not purely military purposes. Coincidentally, recently I was looking up something about pedantry and I came across this definition or explanation:
Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry … To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery. –George Polya, mathematician (13 Dec 1887-1985).
Further, from Hegseth:
It was stuff like, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ which was their immediate target, right? Right out the gate, we need to change that and – say what you want about what about that, people are passionate on that issue. But it was most centrally, uh, demonstrated with women in combat this idea that there’ll be gender neutrality and selection.
Again, there’s a new sheriff in town, and this sheriff will be targeting “woke”. Anyone with their eyes open and tuned into the world will be shot. We don’t need that shit.
Idiots.
Karl Marx (John Jabez Edwin Mayall, PD) and Pete Hegseth (cropped, [Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0])