Comment: Anti-‘woke’ crusades by Hegseth, Rubio petty, dangerous

By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion

The actor Sean Penn has summed up the problem with Pete Hegseth, and by extension the administration of President Trump. “I’ve never before seen a Secretary of Defense so aggressively demote himself to the rank of Chief PETTY Officer,” Penn said upon hearing that the Pentagon boss has ordered the Navy to rename an oiler called the USNS Harvey Milk.

The naming of a ship (or a gulf, or anything) is often a bureaucratic gesture of forgettable symbolism. Not in this case and a slew of others that Hegseth is currently reviewing. The effort instead points to a worrisome obsession that causes division, distraction and the diversion of scarce energy from real foreign conflicts toward domestic culture wars.

Milk, whom Penn played in a screen biopic, was the first openly gay man to hold elected office in California (he was later assassinated) and had earlier been a lieutenant in the Navy during the Korean War. Homosexuality was then a crime in the military, so Milk was eventually given a Hobson’s choice: He could face a court-martial or resign with a discharge that was “other than honorable.” In 1955, Milk chose the latter option.

To show that America’s armed forces no longer waste such human talent and exclude so many patriotic Americans, the Navy in 2016 named a ship after Milk. But to Trump, who won his first presidency that year, that gesture was part of a pathology which Hegseth later called the “DEI/woke shit,” referring to norms favoring diversity, equity and inclusion.

Fresh into office, Hegseth fired senior officers including the first woman to command the Coast Guard, the first woman to run the Navy and the second Black person to lead the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Had that chairman been hired “because of his skin color? Or his skill?,” Hegseth had wondered in “The War on Warriors,” published in 2024; “we’ll never know, but always doubt.”

Backed by Trump, Hegseth then kept purging the Pentagon. He ended the hiring of trans people, as well as the (very rare) medical procedures for those already enlisted. A deadline just expired for trans service members to decide whether to leave the military voluntarily or be forced out; a choice reminiscent of Milk’s that many describe as “crushing” and “heartbreaking.” (In 2016 the RAND Corporation concluded that trans people had no negative impact on lethality or unit cohesion.) Hegseth also banned celebrations of “identity months” such as those dedicated to Black history; Hispanic, American Indian and Pacific Islander heritage; the disabled; women; and of course Gay Pride.

The initiative to rename the Harvey Milk indeed seems timed to disrupt Pride month. But Hegseth also has a bead on other ships he considers woke-ish: those named after the first Black Supreme Court justice, abolitionists and suffragettes, as well as civil-rights and labor leaders.

Simultaneously, Hegseth, in the name of cultivating a “warrior ethos,” demonstratively does push-ups with his troops and engages in other rituals of hyper-masculinity, while leading Christian services in the Pentagon auditorium with a pastor who in his prayer thanked God “for the way that you have used [Trump] to bring stability and moral clarity to our land.”

Hegseth’s colleague at Foggy Bottom (and the National Security Council), Marco Rubio, is at it too, instructing staff to assign a sex to trans passport holders and expunging DEI terms from training courses. Power within the department has shifted to officials who belong to the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization technically outside of the department that pushes MAGA stances and in particular the struggle against what it alleges has been State’s “Anti-Christian and Reverse-DEI Persecution.”

Ben Franklin fellows include Christopher Landau, the deputy Secretary of State, and Lew Olowski, who runs the department’s equivalent of human resources. A recent awards ceremony eulogized those foreign-service officers who, as one speaker put it, have long “been intentionally passed over for promotion and assignments abroad” owing to DEI. At one point, some of the assembled diplomats undiplomatically jeered and walked out.

The State Department is also alienating foreign countries directly. U.S. embassies across Europe have sent letters to companies and local governments that interact with the American missions, requiring them to certify that they don’t have DEI policies on the books. DEI is a voguish American term not necessarily used in other cultures, but many countries, and the European Union, do have laws and norms against discrimination, and like it that way. When the municipality of Stockholm received an American demand to comply within 10 days, a city official told Bloomberg that he was “shocked” and that “of course we’ll not do that.”

An argument in favor of Hegseth, Rubio and their ilk is that their campaigns merely correct an earlier overshooting, when the armed and diplomatic services, along with much of American society, got lost in pronoun mazes and went bonkers in the name of woke-ism. I have some sympathy for that analysis. And yet the backlash now seems Robespierrean; excessive and maniacal.

Another positive spin on the anti-DEI crusade is that it is needed to restore meritocracy generally and the “warrior ethos” specifically. But whether those were ever under threat is moot. The more plausible conclusion is that Hegseth and the administration are not trying to level a playing field previously warped by identity politics, but to shift power to a group they happen to favor: men, especially the Christian, straight and pale kind.

This campaign sows division at a time when Defense and State should instead be conserving and concentrating their resources to face the menace to America from an aggressive Russia, a revisionist China and a rogue North Korea and Iran. If this administration really thinks that national security is threatened by a refueling vessel named after a gay sailor, it deserves to enter history books as not just petty, but dangerously so.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion.