Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Trump's administration is barely bothering to pretend that the firings at the Department of Defense are about anything but bigotry. On Friday, Trump fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., only the second Black person to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To add insult to injury, the highly qualified Brown was replaced by Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, a white man who, according to the Associated Press, "has not had key assignments identified in law as prerequisites for the job." Promoting unqualified white men over qualified women and minorities isn't just the modus operandi of the Trump administration. There's a long paper trail pointing to race as the reason they painted a target on Brown's back.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is the shining example of Trump's love of giving plum jobs to wholly unqualified white men, has long held a racialized resentment of Brown. By his own admission, Hegseth's military career was a failure. He complained the Army "spit me out," though he tries to save face by claiming "the feeling was mutual." General Brown had a dramatically more successful career than Major Hegseth, with four stars and a storied journey from fighter pilot to commanding the Pacific Air Forces. Yet Hegseth sneeringly suggested in his 2024 book that Brown only got his promotion because of "his skin color." Hegseth claims this insult is justified because Brown "made the race card one of his biggest calling cards." This appears to be a reference to Brown's willingness to publicly state both that racism exists and that racism is bad, sentiments that should be unobjectionable to anyone who is not a racist.
It's helpful to look at the church Hegseth joined a few years ago, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). The denomination is led by a pastor named Doug Wilson, whose work Hegseth has promoted in podcast appearances and his writings. In December, I wrote about how Wilson's teachings about women's inferiority appear to inform Hegseth's hostility to women in the military. Wilson's views on race are just as grotesque, unscientific, and ahistorical.
"Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since," Wilson wrote in his 1996 defense of Confederate slave owners, "Southern Slavery As It Was." "There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world," he continued, painting slavery as an Edenic paradise for those captured in it. "Slave life was to [the slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes and good medical care."
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is the shining example of Trump's love of giving plum jobs to wholly unqualified white men, has long held a racialized resentment of Brown. By his own admission, Hegseth's military career was a failure. He complained the Army "spit me out," though he tries to save face by claiming "the feeling was mutual." General Brown had a dramatically more successful career than Major Hegseth, with four stars and a storied journey from fighter pilot to commanding the Pacific Air Forces. Yet Hegseth sneeringly suggested in his 2024 book that Brown only got his promotion because of "his skin color." Hegseth claims this insult is justified because Brown "made the race card one of his biggest calling cards." This appears to be a reference to Brown's willingness to publicly state both that racism exists and that racism is bad, sentiments that should be unobjectionable to anyone who is not a racist.
It's helpful to look at the church Hegseth joined a few years ago, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). The denomination is led by a pastor named Doug Wilson, whose work Hegseth has promoted in podcast appearances and his writings. In December, I wrote about how Wilson's teachings about women's inferiority appear to inform Hegseth's hostility to women in the military. Wilson's views on race are just as grotesque, unscientific, and ahistorical.
"Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since," Wilson wrote in his 1996 defense of Confederate slave owners, "Southern Slavery As It Was." "There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world," he continued, painting slavery as an Edenic paradise for those captured in it. "Slave life was to [the slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes and good medical care."
"Slavery produced a genuine affection between the races": Hegseth's church foretold "DEI" firings
Defense secretary's contempt for Black military leaders has roots in his religion's defense of white supremacy
