Pete Hegseth Sent National Guard Troops Home for Being Too Fat

The military has no more space for overweight soldiers.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegesth confirmed Monday that he had sent some of the Texas National Guard members stationed in Illinois back to their home state for failing to meet the department’s new height and weight requirements.

“Standards are back at The @DeptofWar,” Hegseth wrote on X, circulating a screenshot of an article announcing the sudden change of the guard.

The troops’ departure followed public backlash to a string of photos published by ABC News, which captured several heavyset Texas National Guard members as they arrived in the Prairie State.

“In less than 24 hours, Texas National Guardsmen mobilized for the Federal Protection Mission,” a department spokesperson told military news website Task & Purpose over the weekend. “The speed of the response necessitated a concurrent validation process, during which we identified a small group of service members who were not in compliance and have been replaced.”

But fat people aren’t the only individuals that the former Fox News host has chosen to discriminate against: Hegseth announced new physical expectations for U.S. troops during a rare assembly of the military’s top brass late last month. Speaking before hundreds of America’s top military commanders at a mandatory in-person meeting in Quantico, Hegseth unveiled his latest efforts to de-woke-ify the country’s armed forces, including resetting military combat requirements to the “highest male standard only.”

“When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral,” Hegseth said during his speech. “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”

In the same speech (that military leadership found pointless and uninspiring), Hegseth pledged that there would be “no more beardos” in the U.S. armed forces, a decision that will disproportionately affect Black service members due to the potentially injurious effects of frequently shaving their faces, given the curl pattern of their hair.

Ironically, Hegseth’s strict new standard is undermining one of Donald Trump’s goals: sending troops to U.S. cities.

It looks like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new press policy will ensure that the only outlet with a desk inside the Pentagon is a MAGA propaganda machine.

Hegseth, who has reportedly been “consumed” by trying to stop numerous leaks from his department, has moved to install a new “pledge” for journalists covering the Pentagon, requiring them to abstain from receiving any unauthorized material. Under the new rules, all agency information “must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” and those who fail to follow the policy would have their credentials revoked.

If Hegseth wanted a press he could control, it seems he may be getting his wish. Nearly every mainstream outlet has balked at the policy. As of Tuesday morning, it looks like the only news outlet that will retain access to the Pentagon will be One America News Network, a right-wing news outlet that is outrageously pro-Trump.

In May, OAN partnered with the United States Agency for Global Media to replace Voice of America, a government-funded broadcaster the Trump administration was recently blocked from shuttering, with its own right-wing newsfeed.

Hegseth claimed in a post on X Monday that the new press policy would prevent the reporters from roaming free, require them to wear badges, and bar them from “solicit[ing] criminal acts.” But reporters were always required to wear badges and never allowed to wander the halls of the Pentagon. Still, the secretary had previously barred the press from certain areas of the building in May.

The Military Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit for journalists covering the military, published an article by military journalist Steve Walsh Monday urging reporters not to sign onto the new policy, calling it an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”

“Secretary Hegseth has not briefed Pentagon reporters in nearly four months, and Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson has not conducted a briefing in two months,” Walsh wrote. “The Defense Department has avoided questions from the press, all while U.S. troops are operating around the globe, the Pentagon has conducted legally questionable military strikes that have killed people in international waters and the administration has deployed troops to American cities.”

Even Fox News joined with ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC to release a statement Tuesday afternoon rejecting the policy, saying it was “without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.”

This story has been updated.

Former FBI Director James Comey scored an early victory this week, as U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff shut down the Justice Department’s proposed restrictions on Comey’s ability to access discovery, the evidence and information the prosecution provides to the defense before trial.

The DOJ had sought to prohibit Comey’s access to discovery when not under the supervision of his attorneys, citing the “sensitive” nature of the records. Comey’s lawyers disagreed, saying this would place the defense “at a severe and unnecessary disadvantage.” After all, they noted, throughout his prosecutorial career through his time at the FBI, Comey was “entrusted with some of the most sensitive and highly guarded information in the country.”

The court sided with Comey on Monday, with Nachmanoff ruling that “the circumstances of this case do not support the government’s proposed limitations on the sharing of ‘Protected Material’ with Defendant or prospective defense witnesses, which would unnecessarily hinder and delay Defendant’s ability to adequately prepare for trial.”

Comey was indicted last month on charges, widely regarded as politically motivated, of false statements to Congress and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. Comey pleaded not guilty, and his legal team is expected to try getting the case dismissed for “vindictive prosecution.” Though such dismissals are rare, Comey seems to have a better-than-average chance, given President Donald Trump has made obvious his animosity toward him.

The Supreme Court has tossed Alex Jones’s efforts for a renewed defamation challenge, denying his request to review and potentially overturn the $1.4 billion judgment against him for making conspiratorial comments that undermined the severity and legitimacy of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.

Jones made his name and living by labeling the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people including 20 children, a “hoax.” His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

“The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions,” Jones told the Supreme Court, in an appeal filed in September.

The families chose not to respond, and they were not ordered by the court to do so.

The Sandy Hook ruling effectively bankrupted Jones, ordering the conspiracist to cough up more than a billion dollars to the victims of the tragedy. However, Jones has managed to hold off on paying out the massive sum by filing for bankruptcy in 2022. So far, he hasn’t paid a single cent.

Last month, it appeared that the Trump administration was willing to go to bat for Jones after the Justice Department pledged to investigate one of the witnesses in Jones’s defamation case, retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, the first responder to arrive at the school. But that case unraveled quickly—just 24 hours after Jones announced the lawsuit, Justice Department officials shut it down.

President Trump was up in the middle of the night posting about how Time Magazine didn’t get his good side.

“Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time. They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!” the president wrote at 1:36 a.m. on Monday in response to the glowing cover Time gave him titled “His Triumph,” which prominently pictures him from a close-up lower angle with the sun shining right behind his head, making his thinning blond hair appear even thinner.

“I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out,” Trump continued. “What are they doing, and why?”

Leave it to Trump to take issue with a glowing cover story about a ceasefire deal that may come to define his term because he doesn’t like the way he looks in it. The picture isn’t even that bad—he always looks like that.