How Pete Hegseth Is Forcing Women Out of the Military

Women are already getting squeezed out of Pete Hegseth’s military.

A female Navy captain was set to become the first woman to oversee Navy SEALs in a Naval Special Warfare command in July—until her promotion was abruptly canceled with little to no explanation.

She was the top officer for promotion in her cohort, CNN reported Tuesday on the unnamed commander. She received a Purple Heart for her time in Iraq, during which she was injured in an IED attack. She was also the first female troop commander to serve with SEAL Team Six.

“She was the best man for the job. There is absolutely no DEI,” a retired SEAL told CNN.

But two weeks before the ceremony commemorating her advance was set to take place, her rank change was canceled.

The decision came through a series of phone calls that skirted formal channels while omitting a paper trail, several sources told CNN. The consensus among Naval Special Warfare is that the incoming commander was yanked by the defense secretary because of her gender.

“They want to keep it the brotherhood and don’t like that she’s coming in and challenging the status quo,” a Navy special operations source familiar with the situation told the news network.

A Pentagon official said that the command was pulled because the officer wasn’t a SEAL, not because she is a woman, and that Hegseth had no hand in the matter. But multiple people familiar with Navy personnel dynamics weren’t buying it.

And many people are worried about what Hegseth’s policies will do to the state of women in the military in general. “To be quite honest, I am fearful for women in uniform right now,” said Patti J. Tutalo, a retired Coast Guard commander. Tutalo served on an advisory group for women in the military before it was shut down this year after decades of work.

“I definitely think there will be a retention issue for women. I also think that you’re going to see an increase in assaults, increase in harassment, increase in bullying, hazing, and I think there’ll be a lack of accountability for those things.”

In September, Hegseth announced to hundreds of America’s top military commanders at a mandatory in-person assembly in Quantico that he would be 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 at the time. “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.”

Women made up 17.3 percent of America’s active-duty force in 2021, with more than 231,000 members. That same year, they composed 21.4 percent of the National Guard, according to a demographics report from the Defense Department.

Hegseth has openly said before that he does not believe women should serve in combat roles. During a November 2024 interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, Hegseth said, “I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.”

The United Kingdom isn’t playing about President Donald Trump’s extrajudicial military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats—it’s cutting him off from the intelligence apparatus used to track boats, CNN reported Tuesday.  

The U.K., which controls some territories in the Caribbean, operates an intelligence network in the area. The top ally has long assisted the United States in monitoring alleged drug trafficking in the Caribbean, sharing its intelligence with the Joint Interagency Task Force South. 

Typically, the boats would be stopped, boarded, and searched. But recently, Trump has opted to just blow them up, killing dozens of crew members, violating international law. 

In a major break between longtime allies, the U.K. stopped sharing this intelligence with the U.S. government after it grew concerned that the Pentagon was using the information to carry out its extrajudicial executions, sources told CNN.

The Trump administration has claimed that its military strikes have targeted “unlawful combatants” who are part of foreign cartels it argues are “nonstate armed groups.” To assert its authority to make the strikes, the U.S. government claims the transport of drugs constitutes “an armed attack against the United States.”

But a closer look at some of the men killed in these strikes revealed that they were not so-called “narco-terrorists” or members of criminal gangs or cartels. Many of them weren’t even heading for the U.S. And, crucially, they were smuggling cocaine, not synthetic opioids responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. 

Officials in the U.K. aren’t the only ones skeptical of the Trump administration’s ratcheting-up military campaign. During a tense meeting last month, Admiral Alvin Holsey, who has served as commander of the U.S. Southern Command for only a year, offered to resign from his position after he questioned the strikes’ legality, sources told CNN. He is expected to leave his post in December. 

A Utah judge rejected a Republican-drawn congressional map on Monday, choosing instead a map that would create the first Democratic-leaning district in the state in 25 years.

Judge Dianna Gibson found that the map submitted by Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature violated Utah law because it was “drawn with the purpose to favor Republicans.”

While states across the country mount gerrymandering offensives, Utah has been knee-deep in its own redistricting battle: Voters passed Proposition 4 in 2018, which created an independent redistricting committee to draw new state maps and prohibited maps that considered partisan data. But Utah Republican legislators couldn’t tolerate that and repealed the proposition in 2020, creating a new, Republican-favored map.

That caused the organizers behind Prop 4—the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government—to sue in 2022.

Gibson ruled in favor of a Prop 4–compliant map submitted by the plaintiffs, deeming it independently and correctly structured, without partisan influence. Gibson’s ruling could give the Democrats another coveted seat as they head into the midterms.

Utah joins states like Texas, North Carolina, and California that have passed new maps ahead of the midterms—but unlike Texas or California, where the party in power is creating more seats for itself, Utah Republicans’ efforts to do the same thing have brutally backfired.

Eight Senate Democrats didn’t just give up on affordable health care by agreeing to a shutdown deal—they also gave the GOP a clear path to take revenge on former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.

Bloomberg Law has reported that the very end of the Senate-approved shutdown deal contains a hidden provision that essentially allows Republican senators to sue Smith for millions of dollars in damages after their phone records were seized during his investigation into the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The legislation allows any senator who has been searched without their knowledge to be awarded at least $500,000, so long as they weren’t the target of the investigation.

While the provision does not mention Smith by name, it is retroactive to January 1, 2022. That date was just a few months before Smith and the FBI began to request electronic communications from eight GOP senators as part of the January 6 investigation.

“Any Senator whose Senate data, or the Senate data of whose Senate office, has been acquired, subpoenaed, searched, accessed, or disclosed in violation of this section may bring a civil action against the United States if the violation was committed by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States or of any Federal department or agency,” the provision reads. That would certainly include Smith.

Smith has yet to release a statement in response to the news.

The former special counsel has been seen as an enemy of the administration ever since his dual criminal investigations into Trump for illegal possession of classified documents and his role in January 6. Trump pleaded not guilty on all charges before they were dropped altogether after the 2024 election due to convenient Justice Department policy that prevents the prosecution of a sitting president. Smith has maintained both his innocence and the validity of his investigation.

The full Senate-approved funding bill can be read here.

President Donald Trump unveiled his plan to remake the health care system—and it’s a doozy.

As the government shutdown begins to wind down, with some Democrats backing off their bid to extend subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, the president has started waxing on about his own vision for a new system of American health care. 

“I want instead of going to the insurance companies, I want the money to go into an account for people, where the people buy their own health insurance. It’s so good. The insurance will be better. It’ll cost less. Everybody’s gonna be happy. They’re gonna feel like entrepreneurs,”  Trump said during a Fox News interview Monday night. “They’re actually gonna be able to go out and negotiate their own health insurance. And they can use it only for that reason, that’s the beauty—only for that purpose.

“Call it Trumpcare, call it whatever you want to call it. Anything but Obamacare. Obamacare is a disaster, just like he was as a president,” he added. 

Over the weekend, Trump repeatedly floated this model in a series of posts on Truth Social, where he bid Senate Republicans to draft a bill that would distribute the funds directly to Americans in an effort to increase competition and drive down costs. 

While Trump has claimed his plan would help lower premiums, critics say that Trump’s idea is plainly worse than Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act created a marketplace where consumers could use government subsidies to help purchase private-sector plans. It’s not clear that Trump’s plan involves any such marketplace, and would plunge consumers into a state of nature.

Democrats have sought to extend subsidies to make insurance plans more affordable, while Republicans claim Democrats are just lining insurers’ pockets while premiums steadily increase. Crucially, as Republicans ensure that enhanced ACA subsidies lapse, insurance premiums are set to skyrocket starting in January, and premiums for individuals will increase by as much as double. 

“This is, unsurprisingly, nonsensical. Is he suggesting eliminating health insurance and giving people a few thousand dollars instead? And then when they get a cancer diagnosis they just go bankrupt?” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X Sunday.

Currently, Obamacare enrollees never see the funds from their tax credits, which instead are sent directly to insurers. Trump figures that consumers would rather see the money themselves, what little of it there is. His plan purports to take the burden of negotiating insurance rates away from health care providers and large companies, and place it on individuals. 

While it could be a fun foray for Americans who fancy themselves “entrepreneurs,” there is no reason to think the average Americans would ever want to negotiate, or have the tool kit or information to do so in their best interest. Brian S. King, an insurance claims attorney and chair of the Utah Democrats, wrote on X Monday that Trump’s plan would be like “sending lambs to the slaughter.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders chimed in to remind Republicans that there was another way. “Oh, Trump and the Republicans can’t stand how the big, bad insurance companies are ripping off Americans. Really? Are you serious? Then I welcome your support for Medicare for All. Let’s end the greed of the insurance industry & make healthcare a human right, not a privilege,” Sanders wrote on X Sunday. 

Meanwhile, Republicans celebrated Trump’s “simply brilliant” plan. Florida Senator Rick Scott, who committed massive health care fraud as a CEO, claimed Sunday that he was already working on a bill to make Trump’s dream a reality.