“Bro culture” refers to a subculture characterized by male-dominated environments like sports, drinking, and excessive competitiveness. Pete Hegseth is a bro – a hard-drinking, white-supremacy-tattooed, womanizer, who ingratiated himself all the way to the position of Secretary of Defense without any of the skills and experience necessary for that level of leadership. Just another television personality, like the Commander-in-Chief himself, whose ignorance of national security operations contributed to the greatest intelligence breach in modern history (without apology, accountability, or reassurances to the American public as to our safety).
Sean Parnell, our new Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, is a bro and he has the credentials to prove it. In November 2022, he withdrew from the senate race in Pennsylvania, despite Donald Trump’s strong backing, due to a domestic violence scandal where he lost custody of his three children.
On March 17 he held the first Pentagon press conference of the new administration. He told us how “cool” it was to be the first person to give a military briefing and use the term “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico.” He complimented Lt. Gen. Alexis Grynkewich, Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who stood next to him in order to answer operational questions), for “throwing shade” on the Houthis in Yemen. He told us how our 34-count-convicted felon president was bringing moral clarity to our military mission. He trashed our former presidents on their foreign policy, and especially the Biden administration’s handling of the Houthi threat and the withdrawal from Afghanistan (Biden’s follow-through with Trump’s planned withdrawal after Trump’s surrender to the Taliban).
Every aspect of the press conference was an embarrassment compared to the professionalism we are used to from Pentagon spokespersons. He told us that diversity is not our strength, that the new code-word is unity. Of course, for those of us who are career military, we know that unity-in-diversity has been one of the greatest examples the armed forces have ever given to the rest of the country as we integrated African Americans and women into combat roles and higher leadership. But diversity is a threat to “bro culture,” so the new target list for the Trump military is DEI and anything they deem to be “woke.” The problem with this strategy is that the Commander in Chief has decided that an entire political party (approximately 1/3 of the military) is woke – we are witnessing the beginning of a purge of women and minorities (more qualified for their positions than the Secretary of Defense himself) without adequate explanations.
READ: Here’s What Project 2025 Has Planned for the Military
As I watched this sham of a news conference, I was reminded of Kremlin spokespersons over the years spitting out the party line to Russian and international journalists, comfortable telling lies and confident that they would not be challenged by their own media. Parnell called on right-wing-news agencies (Breitbart, News Max, The Daily Caller) for softball questions and he announced that the Trump administration was determined to be the most transparent administration in U.S. history – an administration that, within days, would be lying to the American people, in some cases under oath, concerning the biggest security breach in modern military history (the Signal app compromise of U.S. military battle plans).
Donald Trump learned in his first term that it was the generals (Kelly, Mattis, Milley, McMaster) who put up the guardrails, who held the line against his most destructive, Fascist impulses. Donald Trump’s entire career has been one of violating the law, getting caught, paying the fine, learning the lesson – not the lesson of correcting your immorality – but how to beat the system. This pattern has persisted his entire life, through housing discrimination, bankruptcies, fraudulent businesses, sexual assault and finally assault on democracy itself. Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, author of the book “Fascism,” said that a Fascist is someone willing to illegally use violence to achieve their ends. General Mark Milley said that Trump is “Fascist to the core.” We witnessed that on January 6th, 2021, or what Trump refers to as a day of love.
Trump learned with each acquittal how to course-correct for the next assault; so, Project 2025 was the blueprint for a decapitation of military leadership and an elimination of woke culture, which is just a euphemism for any anti-Trump sentiment.
READ: The MAGA Movement Betrays the United States Military
With the confirmation of Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, we have, for the first time, someone who never served in any of the jobs deemed necessary for the highest U.S. military position; and, once again, Congress has approved an unqualified person based on a presidential waiver and pressure. But the reason why a president would demand personal loyalty over national security goes unexamined – a level of malignant narcissism that is willing to put American lives at risk (on the battlefield and homeland). This ascendancy of “bro culture” starts with the purge of our most qualified American women and minority men in uniform (Admirals Shoshana Chatfield and Linda Fagan and General C.Q. Brown), but ends with collateral damage inflicted on our allies, and America, because of a man-crush, a bromance with the shirtless-Russian-horseman, a “genius” who invaded an allied sovereign nation, engaged in mass murder and war atrocities (a decades-long enemy who the president of the United States once called his “stablemate”).
George Orwell and B.F. Skinner tried to warn us about a dystopian, authoritarian future where humans are slowly brainwashed into a new-normal, into accepting alternative facts. Something that both men saw play out in the real world with state propaganda that promised a return to a better past to make Germany or Russia great again. And now we face a new threat, a world that denigrates the bravery of POW war heroes, like John McCain, that rejects the proven leadership of women like Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, or Kamala Harris, and ushers in a world run by obscenely unqualified and morally bankrupt alpha males – a Bro New World.
