MSNBC’s Wagner: Hegseth Saying He Wants Standards from ‘When Warriors Could Be Real Warriors’ Raises ‘Alarm Bells’

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight,” host Alex Wagner stated that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to “throw away the combat standards, rewind time to, like, 30 years ago when people could do — when warriors could be real warriors. That raises, like, alarm bells for me.” And then asked Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) if he believes “that there’s a real possibility that someone like Hegseth as defense secretary could turn America’s fighting forces into, like, an army of MAGA warriors.”

Wagner played video of Hegseth saying, “Well, first of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the joint chiefs and you’ve got to fire the — obviously, you’ve got to bring in a new secretary of defense. But any general…admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke [bleep] has got to go. Either you’re in for war-fighting, and that’s it, that’s the only litmus test we care about. You’ve got to get DEI and CRT out of the military academies. You’re not training young officers to be baptized into this type of thinking. And then, whatever the standards — whatever the combat standards were, say, in, I don’t know, 1995, let’s just make those the standards. And, as far as recruiting, hire the guy that did ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and create some real ads that motivate people that want to serve.”

She then said, “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and throw away the combat standards, rewind time to, like, 30 years ago when people could do — when warriors could be real warriors. That raises, like, alarm bells for me. I don’t know how you hear that and whether you think that there’s a real possibility that someone like Hegseth as defense secretary could turn America’s fighting forces into, like, an army of MAGA warriors.”

Blumenthal responded, “Even more important than alarm bells for me are alarm bells for our military, because we need professional warfighters. We need people like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chairman Brown, who is a professional officer of the Air Force, a General who knows how to do a military budget, who knows how to hire and promote and recruit and retain the best fighters in the world, which is what national defense requires, and he knows how to keep secrets, which, unfortunately, people like Hegseth do not know how to do. And I want to mention one other point I think is really important on sexual assault. Chairman Brown, Chairman Milley before him, their predecessors, our military have focused on trying to stop sexual assault in the military. I’ve worked with Sen. Gillibrand (D-NY) for the last 15 years. It is still a scourge. To have someone leading the military who, himself, is potentially guilty of sexual assault is such a violation of public trust.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

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