Banning "Enola Gay": Pete Hegseth's DEI paranoia knows no limits

During his confirmation hearing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth repeatedly insisted he is not a racist nor a misogynist, but wants "a Pentagon laser focused on warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness." Despite his bellicose Christianity, however, Donald Trump's appointee had no problem violating the biblical commandment against bearing false witness. As soon as he was sworn in, Hegseth did exactly the opposite of what was promised. He and Trump have devalued merit, expunging experienced and dedicated military leaders for no real reason other than they are not white men. Hegseth demanded budget cuts. He backed Trump's refusal to send older weapons to Ukrainian fighting forces, allowing the U.S. military to update its stockpile. He's gone along with Trump's war on intelligence-gathering on Russia, which puts American troops at higher risk. He's supported Elon Musk's war on veterans, as well, which includes firing them from federal jobs and slashing 80,000 employees from Veterans Affairs. 

Instead, Hegseth's priority — the better word is "obsession" — since taking office has been pushing the racism, misogyny, and queerphobia he denied during his confirmation hearing. Under the guise of eliminating "DEI" (short for "diversity, equity and inclusion," but used as a slur word by the right), Hegseth has waged all-out war on any evidence that people who aren't straight white Christian men can be effective soldiers. On top of purges of military leadership, Hegseth has canceled all military observances of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Pride Month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance and any other occasion acknowledging the contributions of people who aren't straight white Christian men. He's also been on a rampage against military bases that dropped the names of Confederate leaders. Being pro-slavery is enough to exonerate literal treachery in Hegseth's view. 

Last week offered a sobering reminder of how Hegseth's bigotry blitz isn't just symbolic, but will harm real people. The Defense Department reversed a 1965 policy that bars defense contractors from using segregation at their facilities. Under the new rules, the Defense Department can hire firms with "whites only" bathrooms on-premise. Such workplaces likely don't exist in 2025, but with Hegseth's tacit encouragement, who knows how bad things will get. 

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Another recent result of Hegseth's single-minded bigotry is at least kind of funny. In a frenzy to ban anything deemed "DEI," the Defense Department flagged photos and articles featuring the Enola Gay for deletion from all websites and social media posts. The Enola Gay was the plane that dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. The name was not a reference to homosexuality, but was given to the B-29 bomber by the pilot in honor of his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. The database of banned images and references also includes a long list of any service members with the common last name "Gay." It appears Hegseth embraces Musk's view that so-called artificial "intelligence" can replace human workers. In this case, it's for the best, as no human being should waste their precious work hours on Hegseth's dogmatic desire to wipe history clean of all evidence that people who aren't exactly like him are worthy members of society. 

The story did result in some good jokes. 

Enola Gay will henceforth be known as Enola Straight. Fat Man and Little Boy are holding steady. apnews.com/article/dei-...

[image or embed]

— Schooley (@schooley.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 9:31 PM

But overall, this story is mostly a reminder that the U.S. is under siege from a fascist movement led by men who are trying to conceal their mediocrity. While he tries to play the victim of "wokeness," it appears that Hegseth's military career ended in failure. He has complained that the Army "spit me out," an apparent reference to how he was pulled off certain duties because his colleagues notified superiors that he has tattoos that are considered white supremacist symbols. No doubt it's personal for him, seeing so many women, people of color, and LGBTQ people rack up honors and promotions he didn't get during his many years of service. 

It's also ideological for him, however. As I've documented at Salon, Hegseth belongs to a far-right Christian church that teaches slavery was the pinnacle of race relations in the U.S. and that women should not work outside the home or even have the right to vote. These can't be written off as "private" religious views. The church is openly Christian nationalist, which means the leaders advocate for using the government to force their religious beliefs on the nation — basically, theocracy. Hegseth himself has declared a need for an "army" that could remake the U.S. into the far-right Christian society they desire. 

It's not hard to see, therefore, what's going on here: Hegseth sees the U.S. military as a venue for his Christian nationalist social experiment. He's trying to remake the military into his fantasy of a country where straight white Christian men hold all the power and everyone else is marginalized, often to the point of exploitation.

One of the biggest Defense Department hires illustrates how deep Hegseth's extremism runs. As Anna Merlan at Mother Jones reported, the new deputy press secretary at the Pentagon is Kingsley Wilson, a 26-year-old who endorses the neo-Nazi "Great Replacement" theory that holds Jews are secretly trying to "replace" white Christians with immigrants of color. She has called for "zero immigration" and posts German neo-Nazi slogans. She also, just to show the bizarre depths of her fixations, endorses a horrifically anti-semitic conspiracy theory, as Merlan writes:

At least twice, Wilson also repeated long-debunked lies online about the lynching death of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was kidnapped from a Georgia prison and murdered in 1915, claiming he was guilty of the murder for which most modern historians agree he was wrongly convicted.

Pretty much the only people who push these lies about the Leo Frank case are neo-Nazis and the KKK. The lynching of Frank was a precipitating moment for the rise of the KKK in the early 20th century. People who want to valorize the KKK have an interest in perpetuating the myth that Frank's lynching was justified. As professional grammarian Benjamin Dreyer noted on Bluesky, "Amateurs don't dabble in the Leo Frank case; that takes an exceedingly well practiced professional anti-Semite." 

But it's also an extension of a larger far-right effort to rewrite history to romanticize white supremacy and create a false story to justify Christian theocracy. Hegseth is deep in that world, and not just because he wants to recast Confederate generals as heroes instead of villains. The leader of his church has published quite a bit of misleading history, including two books defending chattel slavery in the American South, replete with false claims that slavery was a benevolent institution that served enslaved people's best interests. It's hard to imagine Hegseth is really focused on "warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness." Instead, his energies seem mainly aimed at creating this fantasy world where straight white Christian men are the only ones who matter, and everyone else barely rates mention, unless they're recast as villains in this MAGA delusion.