Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, in a real jaw-dropper of a video posted to X, announced that he has ordered the “complete and immediate cancellation” of all Department of War attendants at universities “like Princeton, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brown and Yale, and many others” because it is cutting ties with those woke universities.
As background, Hegseth, who went to Princeton for undergrad and Harvard for graduate school, had already announced that the Pentagon was ending much of its relationship with Harvard over the rampant anti-Americanism at that establishment. This latest announcement, however, represents a major escalation in the administration’s war against the woke universities.
He began by explaining what sort of relationship between the armed forces and the top universities should exist, saying, “There should exist a sacred trust between America’s institutions and our warriors. It should be a trust that demands we develop our finest military leaders with the highest standards, so that they are equipped to fight and win our nation’s wars with absolute lethality, from basic training to the halls of higher education. That said, our Senior Service colleges have always been expected to act in the interest of this principle, to transform our senior war fighters into strategic thinkers capable of mastering the complexities of modern warfare and leading our joint force to victory at every echelon.”
He then noted that the Ivy League schools have largely abrogated that duty, saying,”Unfortunately, this sacred trust has been broken in this military’s professional military education system, it’s been poisoned from within by a class of so-called elite universities who have abused their privilege and access to this department and utterly betrayed their purpose.”
Giving examples of how they have done so, he said, “For decades, the Ivy League and similar institutions have gorged themselves on a trust fund of American taxpayer dollars, only to become factories of anti American resentment and military disdain. They’ve taken our best and brightest, the men and women who pledged their lives to this nation, and subjected them to a curriculum of contempt. They’ve replaced the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness. They’ve traded true intellectual rigor for radical dogma, sacrificing free expression for the suffocating confines of leftist ideology.”
Going nuclear on the schools for those terrible changes, he said, “This is not education. It’s indoctrination. It’s a calculated, targeted assault on the core of our fighting force, and it is a betrayal that we will no longer tolerate. The Department of War is finished subsidizing the corruption of our own uniform class. We’re done paying for the privilege of our enemy’s wicked ideologies to be taught to our future leaders. We’ve had enough.”
Then, getting to what he is demanding and what he is doing, the Secretary of War said, “We demand that senior service colleges work to sharpen our war fighters on genuine national security issues, not social justice activism. We demand curriculums grounded in the founding principles of this republic, principles that champion the enduring ideals of peace through strength and putting American interests first. We demand universities that invest back into our nation’s prosperity rather than our greatest adversaries. It’s common sense. No longer will we sit back and treat these woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination as valid centers of so called intellectual curiosity.” We cannot and will not continue to send our most capable officers, senior officers, into graduate programs that undermine the very values they have sworn to uphold.”
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He continued, “That’s why today, just like we did with Harvard, I’m ordering the complete and immediate cancelation of all Department of War attendance at institutions like Princeton, Columbia, MIT Brown, Yale and many others, starting next academic year.”
Concluding, Hegseth said, “As a final message to our warriors, the Ivy League faculty lounges may loathe you, the so-called elite of academia may mock your patriotism and disdain your sacrifice, but never forget that we the War Department have your back. The American people have your back, and President Trump has your back always you.”
Watch him here: