If you're unpopular, you have to use force

The Department of Defense is pressuring staff to watch or read Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Quantico military address – or else. In recent days, senior officials at Donald Trump’s Pentagon have actively monitored staffers, pressing them to confirm whether they had seen the speech Hegseth forced hundreds of top military officials to listen to last month, according to two Defense Department staffers and another person briefed on the matter.

In some cases, the sources say, the senior officials asked for proof that underlings had actually watched it, and made clear that there would be reprimands – if staff were caught lying or ridiculing the former Fox News host’s address.

“We have other things we need to work on,” one of the Defense Department staffers tells Zeteo. “When they told us we were required to watch the Hegseth speech, I did not realize they were going to throw this kind of manpower at enforcing the mandatory viewing of a Trump rally.”

[...]

At times, when subordinates have replied that they had watched the nearly hour-long speech in full, higher-ranking officials have immediately asked the staffers questions about the speech – as if to, in the words of one of the sources, “test” them and make sure they aren’t lying. In other instances, Defense Department staff were warned that there would be negative consequences if they were found to have not actually watched or read the speech, or if they were found to have mocked Hegseth’s address.

[...]

The second Trump administration is expending a gargantuan amount of resources and public money into making the president feel good about himself and propping up his personality cult – with the enforcement of government-wide programs that easily eclipsed the one-billion-dollar mark earlier this year. When it comes to the Pentagon and the American military, the Trump White House and Hegseth have similarly made it a priority to siphon significant public resources towards amplifying their self-parodying MAGA ideology and – as one US official put it recently – their pervasive “culture-war bullshit.”

  Zeteo

It's a new day in America. Expect the worst, and don't be surprised when it happens. I used to always say, stop electing Republicans. I'm afraid I didn't have much influence. Now, we have to go to other remedies. Good luck.