FOR MILITARIZATION AGAINST TRUMP
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On Tuesday, September 30, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a long, weird speech in Quantico to the entire top brass of the US Army, flown there from all around the world, deploying his vision for how the US military will physically look and act, and offering a stark conclusion: If you don’t agree, resign. “The right policies, according to Hegseth, center on his broader campaign against past efforts that he has deemed ‘woke,’ aimed at promoting diversity or accommodating troops—the specifics of which were made official in ten directives sent out to military leadership as he spoke. There will be no ‘fat troops’ or ‘fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,’ Hegseth said. Troops will be clean-shaven, and the military will offer few, if any, exemptions, either for religious or medical needs. There will be only male physical standards for combat jobs, and if that means there are no women in those roles, ‘it is what it is.’”
As anonymously noted by many officers present, this image of a soldier is much more theatrical than a faithful rendering of army life as it actually is. Hegseth’s wish to get “real soldiers” resuscitates an old image of a soldier that has no place in today’s wars, fought by drones and rockets mostly controlled by geeks behind a screen, and in today’s world where we were just informed about the first AI-generated actress, “Tilly Norwood,” who already appeared as the star in the AI-generated comedy sketch “AI Commissioner” and in various promotional and social media content. Paradoxically, Hegseth’s figure of a soldier is a masculine version of Tilly Norwood—an imagined fake we could call “Till Norwood.” However, more important than this fantasy is Hegseth’s description of what these new soldiers should be doing:
“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement. This administration has done a
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